Donaldson Romeo

Donaldson Romeo (born 1962) is the Premier of Montserrat.

Romeo was born in Salem, Montserrat in 1962. He attended Salem Primary School and Montserrat Secondary School, before becoming a pupil at the George School, a boarding school in the United States. Although he started studying medicine at Temple University, he returned to Montserrat after a year to help his father with his hardware business. In 1984 he moved to the United Kingdom, where he became an artist. He was served with a deportation order, but after gaining support from MPs Ken Livingstone and John Carlisle and the National Portrait Gallery, his order was overturned on a technicality.

After the court case, Romeo returned to Montserrat and continued working as an artist before rejoining his family's hardware firm. Following the eruption of Soufrière Hills in the mid-1990s, he became a journalist.

Political career

Romeo was a candidate for the Montserrat Democratic Party in the 2006 general elections. He ran in the 2009 elections as an independent, and was elected. In 2011 he became Leader of the Opposition. On 30 April 2014 Romeo established the People's Democratic Movement (PDM) in order to contest the upcoming elections. The elections saw the PDM win seven of the nine seats in the Legislative Council, becoming the ruling party.