Political division within the opposition has reduced its ability to win power in the Virgin Islands since 2018, Bishop John I. Cline, interim president of the National Democratic Party (NDP) said, arguing that repeated splits among parties and opposition figures have worked to the advantage of the governing Virgin Islands Party.
Speaking in an interview with Cathy Richards of JTV, Bishop Cline said voters had sent a consistent message to opposition politicians over the years: “You cannot expect to govern this country divided.” He said fragmentation among the NDP, the Progressive Virgin Islands Movement (PVIM) and later the Alliance had weakened the opposition’s chances of forming government.
The split traces back to 2018, when Honourable Ronnie W. Skelton broke from the NDP after the party’s internal leadership contest and went on to form the PVIM. Honourable Melvin “Mitch” Turnbull also left the NDP and joined the new party. The division became a defining feature of the 2019 election cycle, when the VIP won eight of the 13 seats in the House of Assembly and returned to government.
The pattern continued into the 2023 general election. Final results left the House without a clear majority, with the VIP winning six seats, the NDP three, the PVIM three and Progressives United (PU) one. That outcome led to coalition negotiations rather than a direct transfer of power to a unified opposition bloc.
More recently, the opposition has undergone another round of realignment. In March 2025, the NDP and PVIM announced the start of a reunification process after years of division. In March 2026, Honourables Walwyn and Turnbull, who had been operating as part of the Alliance, also rejoined the NDP.
Bishop Cline said those moves reflected public pressure for unity. “There’s only one way to victory,” he said, adding that internal differences should not outweigh what he described as the national interest.
Public reporting over the past year has shown that the reunification process itself has not been without dispute. In March 2025 Turnbull had said that he was unaware of any formal internal process to dissolve the PVIM, while other opposition figures publicly disagreed over whether the NDP and PVIM should have merged on equal terms or one party should absorb the other.
Even so, Bishop Cline said the broader lesson of the past several election cycles was clear: opposition parties that remain fractured are less likely to convince voters they can govern effectively. His argument stops short of proving that division alone caused the opposition’s losses, but election results since 2019 show that the anti-VIP vote has repeatedly been spread across several political groupings rather than consolidated behind one organisation.
