Top political pundits were Monday predicting that newly sworn-in Opposition Leader Ralph Thorne will seek to mend ties with the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) that he severed 20 years ago in a bid to boost his political position.Hours after Thorne took up office, University of the West Indies academic and Independent Senator Dr Kristina Hinds, pollster Peter Wickham and retired university academic Dr George Belle told Barbados TODAY in separate interviews they strongly believed that Thorne’s next course of action would be approaching the DLP which has been out of Parliament for the last six years.If Thorne is accepted back into the DLP fold, the political scientists suggested the ousted party would finally find a silver lining in a cloud of political uncertainty after a second resounding whitewash at the polls.But a return would mean dark clouds immediately hovering over Dr Ronnie Yearwood’s future as the political leader of the Dems, one of them noted.After two unsuccessful bids to win a seat on a DLP ticket in the St Michael North constituency in 1994 and 1999, Thorne abruptly shifted allegiance, campaigning for the Barbados Labour Party (BLP) in the 2003 poll. But he did not contest a seat until his eventual election victory in 2018, in the first of Mia Mottley’s landslide wins for the Labour Party that shut the DLP out of the House of Assembly for the first time since the party entered elective politics in 1956.
