KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent, CMC -Opposition Leader Dr. Ralph Gonsalves has defended his Unity Labor Party’s (ULP) stewardship of St. Vincent and the Grenadines and has urged the Goodwin Friday government not to follow the measures outlined by an International Monetary Fund (IMF) mission that ended a weeklong mission here earlier this week.
Gonsalves said that there was a clash between the IMF-style austerity and what he called the ULP’s philosophy of “prudence and enterprise,” adding “the main events [are] they want to bring in an austerity program, which is a wrong and dangerous idea.
“The IMF wants to do it on Friday, which is going to harm the poor, the working people, and the nation as a whole. Those who are poor are gonna make you poorer, those who come out of poverty and into the middle class, it will drag you down, back into poverty.”
Earlier this week, Prime Minister Friday said that his New Democratic Party (NDP) government, which ended the ULP’s 25-year stint in power last November, will use a rules-based strategy to tackle St. Vincent and the Grenadines’ mounting debt and fragile fiscal position.
Prime Minister Friday, who is also the Minister of Finance, said the country “cannot continue on the course that we have been going for the past several years” and still hope that “somehow the challenges will resolve themselves”.
He, however, said that while international institutions are providing technical support, the recovery program will be homegrown and rooted in national ownership.
“We will implement, we will develop, devise, of course, with your technical assistance, as we have said, you have offered, our homegrown economic stabilization program that will ensure that we have national ownership of the recovery journey on which we are embarking,” said Prime Minister Friday, who was flanked by Sergei Antoshin, who led the IMF mission to Kingstown.
“I welcome, quite frankly, the tone and the approach that you have demonstrated in your presentation here…, but also in our conversations, to understand that it is not just a balance sheet matter… it involves people’s lives,” Friday said, adding that any adjustment program must be socially fair, particularly in the face of high oil prices and inflation.
“We have to have a social consensus to be able to say, ‘OK, together, we will meet these challenges,” he said.
But Gonsalves has taken issue with the content of the IMF’s recommendations as well as with the optics and symbolism of the prime minister sharing the stage with an IMF staff mission chief.
“I never, on one single occasion, ask the head of the IMF mission to come to sit with me in a press conference to talk to the people,” Gonsalves said.
“This time Friday brought the head of the IMF team to a press conference so he could hide behind the coattails … when he’s going to deliver bitter medicine for the people of St. Vincent and the Grenadines.”
Gonsalves said the news conference was tantamount to the government submitting to the IMF, adding that the party’s leadership has “a mentality of submission, not genuine dialogue with the IMF, and to resist them with their prescriptions where resistance is necessary”.
The island’s national debt as of December 31, 2025, was EC$3.5 billion (One EC dollar = US$0.37 cents), which the World Bank estimated at 113-120 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP).
But Gonsalves said the rise in debt and fiscal deficits was largely due to shocks and reconstruction, not to reckless spending, and quoted Antoshin as saying that fiscal deficits widened, “driven by post-disaster rebuilding and post-disaster relief, as well as large construction projects and rising current expenditure”.
Gonsalves said that these “large construction projects” were schools, sea and river defenses, clinics, stadiums, the port, hospital, and the airport, and that regarding the national debt, EC$2.1 to EC$2.3 billion is “cheap foreign debt, overseas external debt”, with just under one billion dollars being domestic debt, mainly bonds.
“When they’re talking about the debt … the bulk of the debt is cheap, overwhelmingly,” Gonsalves said, adding that there was an agreed plan with the IMF to put the debt-to-GDP ratio on a downward trajectory.
“There was a plan to have it on a downward trajectory to reach by 2035 about 60–65 percent of GDP,” he said.
Gonsalves, speaking on his weekly radio program, said what exists in t. Vincent and the Grenadines is a clear choice between opposing economic visions.
“I want this program to be played over and over… to see the difference between the perspective of Friday and the IMF, on the one hand, and I and the ULP, on the other hand,” he said.
“The lines are drawn clearly. We must reject the austerity message of the IMF and Friday and instead talk about prudence and enterprise… and inclusive growth,” Gonsalves added.
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