History
The PLP was co-founded in 1953 by William Cartwright, Cyril Stevenson, and Henry Milton Taylor. The PLP was the first national political party in the Bahamas.
The party governed for a total of 30 years, from 1967 to 1992 and again from 2002 to 2007. Leading the party to its first victory in 1967 was Lynden Pindling, the country's first Prime Minister. The party nationalized some private businesses due to socialist tendencies.
Perry Christie was Prime Minister of The Bahamas between May 2, 2002 and the 2007 general elections when the party was defeated by the rival Free National Movement (FNM) which won 23 seats, amid a scandal involving the residency of model and reality television star Anna Nicole Smith and allegations that Christie’s then-immigration minister had fast-tracked her application to live in the island. The FNM installed leader Hubert Ingraham as the Prime Minister. After defeat and one of its MPs leaving the party since, the PLP held 17 of the 41 seats in the Bahamas National Assembly.
In the 2012 general election on 7 May 2012, the Progressive Liberals won a solid majority in a landslide election victory, taking 29 of the 38 seats in parliament. Christie was sworn into office on 8 May 2012.
Hubert Ingraham announced his retirement from politics following the defeat of his party. This was the first general election in which the Democratic National Alliance, a third party offered a full slate of candidates along with the two major parties; however, the DNA lost the only seat it held in the prior parliament (that of Branville McCartney, its founder and only MP) and elected no candidates. Elections in the Bahamas take place in the framework of a parliamentary democracy, which relies on the first past the post system of voting.
Read more about this topic: Progressive Liberal Party
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