Freundel Stuart
Freundel Stuart was prime minister of Barbados from October 2010, when Thompson died in office of pancreatic cancer at forty-eight, to May 2018, when his Democratic Labour Party lost every one of the thirty seats in the House to Mottley, the first time a governing party anywhere in the Commonwealth Caribbean had been wiped out entirely. The seven and a half years between were the ones in which the island's economy went from the Caribbean's model to a junk-rated debtor. The debt rose from seventy per cent of output to a hundred and seventy. The rating agencies downgraded the country twenty-two times. The reserves fell to five weeks of imports. The value-added tax rose to seventeen and a half per cent. The tertiary education that Arthur had made free was made paid for in 2014. Three thousand public servants were laid off the same year. The sewage system on the south coast failed in 2017 and ran in the streets of the tourist strip for a year. The IMF was not called. That was his pride and the country's cost. He was a lawyer, a careful and slow speaker whom the island called the Silent Sentinel and worse, who did not answer the press and did not, for long stretches, appear. He said, when the election came, that the people would judge. They did, by seventy-three per cent to twenty-two. He won the election of February 2013 by sixteen seats to fourteen, which nobody had expected. He took it as endorsement. The five years after were the decline, which he did not call one. He was born in St Philip, the son of a plantation worker. He took his degrees at the University of the West Indies, and was called to the bar. He sat in the Senate from 1993, entered the House in 1994 for St Philip South, lost the seat in 1999 and won it back in 2008. He was Thompson's attorney-general and deputy. He gave up the party's leadership the day after the wipe-out. He has practised law and said little since. The party has not won a seat in the two elections that followed.
- Lived: 1951 CE – ?
- Nationality: Barbadian
- Roles: prime minister, lawyer, politician
