St. Eustatius has a new DP/Lijfrock government, hopefully one that will last a bit longer than the PLP/STEP/UPC "Coalition of Hope" to provide some much-needed stability in government. In that regard it was ironic that newly-appointed Commissioner Glenville Schmidt, who had already been commissioner for STEP before he was voted out of office with a motion of no-confidence in December, commented that he was allowing himself to "go to the slaughterhouse" for a second time.

As pointed out before, the strict division between the legislative and executive branches introduced when Bonaire, Statia and Saba became special overseas public entities of the Netherlands on 10-10-10 has not made governing these islands any easier. While the move is completely understandable based on the "separation of powers" principle, one has to wonder whether the local political establishment was ready for its introduction on such a small scale, judging by the fact that both Bonaire and St. Eustatius have experienced a shift in government since then.

One of the other, underlying reasons is a second adjustment that came with the new constitutional status, whereby the so-called "seat-threshold" of the no-longer-existent Netherlands Antilles was removed. In the old days, a party had to reach at least the seat quota – the number of valid votes cast divided by the number of seats – to qualify for a seat.

This automatically meant that, in addition to seats they earned outright, the larger parties that made the quota would divide between them based on a fixed formula the seats that remained due to one or more smaller parties not qualifying; the so-called "residual seats." The system discouraged political disintegration in terms of many tiny parties, as did the earlier-abandoned practice of requiring a percentage of the overall vote from the most recent previous election in support signatures for the candidate lists of new parties, so that many were never even able to make it to the polls.

All these changes obviously have been made to promote more democracy and there is certainly nothing wrong with that. It will take some getting used to, however, so politicians on the three islands in question will have to work hard to improve party loyalty and discipline if they don't want to be faced with one crisis after another.