WILL THE PPP SEIZE THE POLITICAL OPPORTUNITIES?

Without context, the victory of the PPP at the last general elections was a landslide. Within the context of elections in Guyana, where the PPP has gained over or close to 50 percent of the votes in all general elections since 1992, and in the past five years the economy has grown exponentially, creating high hopes for a substantial increase in support, the election results would have fallen below expectations.

But in another sense the election results were a gift to the PPP. Its historic nemesis, the PNC, was shattered, creating the possibility for the reordering of the political landscape of Guyana without the PNC. The last occasion on which the PNC suffered significant loss was in 2006. It lost 5 seats to the AFC. The PPP took no steps to make that loss permanent. Maybe there were no steps it could take. Also, Robert Corbin, the leader of the PNC, established a new leadership by declaring David Granger to be the presidential candidate for 2011. At the 2011 elections the PNC regained the 5 seats it had lost and, together with the AFC, which took votes from the PPP this time around, gained over 50 percent of the votes resulting in a minority PPP government. In coalition, APNU+AFC won the elections in 2015.

For some background, it is important to note that the only time the PNC won over 30 seats was in 1992. It won 31 in 1992, 26 in 1997, 27 in 2001, 22 in 2006, 26 in 2011, 12 in 2025. In 2015 the APNU+AFC coalition won 33 seats. In 2020 the alliance won 31. In these two latter elections the PNC by itself would have brought in less than 30 seats according to an extrapolation from the votes the AFC would have contributed to the coalition. The precipitous decline to 12 seats in 2025 indicates that the PNCR’s message of marginalization and discrimination, ethnic solidarity and ethnic resistance, are not enough to sustain its support.

The rise of WIN demonstrates that supporters have serious issues with APNU’s leadership. We do not know what those issues are. But its long years in opposition, with only one break between 2020 and 2025, during which no material upliftment was experienced by APNU+AFC supporters, and the clumsy and prolonged agony to rig the elections in 2020, which ultimately failed ignominiously, must have taken a toll on the patience of APNU’s and AFC’s supporters. It is not surprising, therefore, that APNU’s strategy of opening its doors to WIN backfired so spectacularly.

There is a discourse going on among the ‘ethnicists,’ those who recognize the ethnic motivations of the electorate and urge its official recognition in practice by the electorate and political parties, that WIN’s victory is no indication that the back of ethno-political dominance is broken merely because APNU’s supporters transitioned to a party led by a wealthy Indian businessman. That might well be so. And we have seen that PNC supporters who abandoned the party for the AFC, which had a prominent Indian politician, Khemraj Ramjattan, in its leadership, returned to the PNC. A significant number of Indians had to have abandoned the PPP in both 2011 and 2020. But they returned. So, we have seen in our politics over the past fifteen years that the ethnic voting patterns is not a fixed, permanent and immovable phenomenon. The shifting sands on which it rests can be further disturbed.       

This time around, the PPP may well consider that it can and should mount a campaign to ensure that the PNCR does not recover as it did in 2011 after its loss to the AFC IN 2006. The first obstacle to any such plan is the viability of WIN having regard to the legal troubles of its leader. If legal processes currently underway result in Mr. Azruddin Mohamed being absent from Guyana for any lengthy period, it is difficult to see how WIN can survive, or survive with the same appeal it currently has with Mr.  Mohamed being present. With this possibility in mind the PPP will need to mount a careful strategy to convince WIN’s supporters that going back to the PNC would be like leaving the frying pan and returning, with eyes fully open, to the fire. The PPP might consider that now is the time while the shattered PNC is struggling for air. Continually demonizing Azruddin Mohamed, who is already in jeopardy, is not a wise strategy.

How does the PNC resist any potential attempt to further reduce its support and recover, even if only partially? First, it has to accept that, by itself, or in coalition with WIN or any other party, it can never win free and fair elections. It needs to stop pretending that it can win if only the elections are not rigged. It has to offer its supporters more than the spectre of endless marginalization and discrimination. It must offer hope and to do so it must overhaul its policies and strategies and place on its agenda a political solution that involves a structural relationship with the PPP, neither as a right nor as a supplicant, but as statesmen and stateswomen, whose supporters have interests, in a nation with national interests.