Barbados New Head of State

Barbadians stand with their national flag. (Creative Commons)

A joint session of Barbados’s House of Assembly and Senate officially elected Dame Sandra Mason as the country’s first president on October 20. Over two-thirds of the legislative branch voted to elect Mason, the current governor-general of Barbados. President-elect Mason will officially take office on November 30, the 55th anniversary of Barbados’s independence from the United Kingdom.

Born and educated in Barbados, Mason has worked in government since the 1990s. After years of service as an ambassador to Venezuela, Chile, Colombia, and Brazil, Mason became the country’s first woman to serve on the Barbados Court of Appeal.

The Government of Barbados declared in September 2020 that it would officially remove Queen Elizabeth II as their Head of State. The government also announced that it would transition from a parliamentary democracy to a republic. 

Various members of Barbados’s government expressed support for the move, stressing the importance of breaking with Barbados’s colonial legacy under the British Empire. The movement has been building for years, and the Black Lives Matter movement amplified it in 2020. During the pandemic, Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley supported replacing Queen Elizabeth II, declaring that “Barbadians want a Barbadian head of state.” Barbados is the latest Caribbean country to make this change: Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, and Dominica all pursued republican forms of government in the late 1970s.

Many experts praise the Barbadian government’s decision to elect Dame Mason, saying that this could have positive effects for the country both domestically and internationally. Within the country, Barbadians believe that rising inequalities stand as legacies of British colonialism. Supporters claim that the election of a Barbadian president will unify the national identity of Barbados and improve the country’s position in the global political arena. Barbados is not the only Caribbean country to have recently considered a republican government; the Jamaican government has also expressed a similar plan. Nevertheless, other countries, including St. Vincent and the Grenadines, voted down attempts at abandoning the monarchy, meaning the Queen’s reign in the Caribbean is far from over.