Pull Quote: “Well,the only party with national,winning electoral credibility and substance is the People’s Progressive Party/Civic(PPP/C);and it would be preposterous to even think that the PPP/C has an interest in joining the PNCR coalition. And the AFC with no national,winning credibility and substance recently rejected the PNCR’s offer,leaving the coalition in the cold.”

ANYTHING that is new enjoys some period of excitement, until that novelty and vogue wear off. In the Guyana context, such newness, invariably, has a short shelf space. Indeed, I am referring to this new People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR) coalition, A Partnership for National Unity (APNU), where its advocates express concerns about other parties’ non-interest in this new ‘coalition’ adventure. The activists’ constant outbursts signify some uneasiness, in that the PNCR coalition as currently constituted cannot win the next election, unless it attracts other partners. Well, the writing is on the wall that the PNCR is running out of partners, as the Alliance for Change (AFC) recently demolished any option of joining this ‘shell coalition’; without a doubt, the PNCR coalition is nothing but a shell, and it emits no incentive and inspires no confidence to attract others into the PNCR fold.
No one will doubt that parties want to win elections, in order to implement policies closest to their policy space (Downs 1957; Riker 1962); in this case, the PNCR will make every effort to have a ‘minimal connected winning coalition’.
Let me explain this term ‘minimal connected winning coalition’. In this coalition, the PNCR would want to have parties that are ‘connected’ in terms of sharing contiguous policies, in order to have electoral credibility; and at the same time, the PNCR will want to have a ‘winnable’ situation, in terms of having the smallest number of parties supported by the smallest number of voters that it can still win over on election day (Browne and Franklin 1973).
But what we are witnessing instead is that the PNCR is striving for a larger coalition, since it must be quite aware of its current ‘shell’ coalition, that by definition, will deliver nothingness come election 2011. Each day, the PNCR is experiencing growing uncertainty as to its capacity for winning, thus the need to attract other parties and to have a larger coalition. For this reason, and predictably, the PNCR opted for an early coalition and will strive for a larger coalition, as it is plagued by this culture of uncertainty of winning.
I would not be surprised if the PNCR coalition grows in size; for a larger size means a larger shell, as none of the major players wants to buy in to this latest PNCR’s escapade. I suspect that in the PNCR’s thinking, a larger coalition will protect it against this culture of uncertainty; anyway, this is how a risk-averse party behaves at election times.
What is rather interesting here, too, is that all parties to the PNCR coalition would naturally want to limit the coalition size to secure maximum influence in any future government; but they would not limit the coalition size if they do not have a sense of the votes they can command. Nonetheless, probably excepting the PNCR, none of the ‘shell’ parties has a clue as to what its potential electoral support is. Therefore, all the coalition partners within the PNCR coalition unsurprisingly would strive for a large coalition.
Given their activists’ signals that the coalition is functioning within a culture of uncertainty,the PNCR coalition’s strategy is foolhardy because instead of enabling voters to see that the coalition partners have a connectedness in policies (Goodin, Guth, and Sausgruber 2007), it is trying to woo other parties into the coalition.
Well, the only party with national, winning electoral credibility and substance is the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C); and it would be preposterous to even think that the PPP/C has an interest in joining the PNCR coalition. And the AFC with no national, winning electoral credibility and substance recently rejected the PNCR’s offer, leaving the coalition in the cold.
The PNCR coalition has no other party of substance remaining with which to tinkle. For these reasons, the PNCR coalition has the wrong political strategy of courting potential partners; it would be in the PNCR coalition’s interest to let voters know about the public connectedness of its partners’ policies.
I am aware that the partners’ policies are different one to the other. And that what its presidential candidate Brigadier David Granger is dishing out to the public are sound bites, not comprehensive policies; and, indeed, he fails to show the connectedness of the PNCR coalition partners’ policies. For these reasons and given that it is a shell, the PNCR coalition continues to insult the Guyanese voters’ intelligence vis-a-vis this outrageous coalition charade for election 2011.