THERE is going to be a proliferation of small parties in 2025 as the country heads into an election. In 2020, 11 small parties were approved by GECOM. Here is the list: the United Republican Party (URP); A New and United Guyana (ANUG); The New Movement (TNM); the Liberty and Justice Party (LJP); The Citizens Initiative (TCI); Organization for the Victory of the People (OVP); the People’s Republican Party (PRP); Change Guyana (CG); the Federal United Party (FEDUP); the National Independent Party (NIP); and the Guyana National Service Party.

Only seven of those parties got votes. Here is the breakdown: ANUG 2,313; CG 1,953; LJP 2,657; PRP 889; TCI 680; TNM 244 and URP 360. The total votes are 9,096. A seat was obtained by three of those parties as a joint formation in what is legally known as the joinder list. The joiner list consisted of ANUG, LJP and TNM. They secured a parliamentary seat to be shared among them. The CG party with eight times the votes to TNM, the PRP with four times the votes of TNM, and TCI with three times the votes of TNM chose not to be part of the joiner list. If they had done so they could have had a stint in parliament.

Why were there 11 small parties in 2020 and why would there be more in 2025? Interestingly, the answer for both 2020 and 2025 overlaps. Let’s look at 2020. Those who had formed the 11 parties saw an opportunity to secure parliamentary representation out of the thinking that the PNC/AFC performed so badly between 2015 and 2020, that they felt that this mediocrity or political suicide created space for them.

It is outside the scope of this column to offer a holistic account of the failure of the PNC/AFC during that five-year period. That should be left for another article devoted to that specific subject matter. Briefly, one can cite one important factor out of dozens of wrong directions (of which the 2018 no-confidence rejection and the mistreatment of sugar workers stand out) of the jejune existence of the Government of Guyana, 2015-2020, that caused Guyanese to return the PPP to power and to give the small parties almost 10, 000 votes.

That factor lay in people’s expectations when it came to certain politicians. The names in the government were so prominent that Guyanese felt that transformational changes would emerge. When it came to names in the PNC/AFC regime, people thought of the AFC bigwigs. But when the PNC/AFC came into power, people were anticipating transformation through the presence of two huge figures – Dr Rupert Roopnaraine and Dr Clive Thomas.

These were large personalities whose politics went back to the beginning of the 1970s and whose books on the description of post-independence degeneracy under Burnham and their revolutionary camaraderie with Walter Rodney created prodigious expectations. Ironically, these two men along with Walter Rodney’s brother-in-law, Keith Scott, then Minister of Housing, failed miserably to add anything even infinitesimal to a new type of governance.

The leadership of those 11 small parties felt in 2020 that they could secure votes from the PNC and AFC who would be rejected by the electorate. It is this same thinking that would lead to the formation of many small parties next year. Even if we do not have a continuation of the same 11 parties, new ones will be born before voting day next year.

There are persons out there who feel that the PNC will be disemboweled in the 2025 election. They feel that Mr Norton is not electable. They believe that voters that reject the Norton-type leadership of the PNC will be looking at other parties and they feel that they can siphon votes from the PNC.

Above, I wrote that the reasons for the birth of the small parties in 2020 are intertwined with factors that will propel their formation in 2025 and here you have the answer. Third parties were born in 2020 because they felt that the PNC and AFC were disasters in government and the electorate would not return them to power. The situation is somewhat identical now.

The PNC is so badly tarnished that as a major party, it poses no threat to the other major contestant – the PPP. My prediction is that the PPP will pull votes from the PNC and will win in 2025. There is an entrenched belief in the AFC that it will get seats at the expense of the PNC. Dominic Gaskin says AFC may get five. Timothy Jonas said ANUG is expecting about four. What will other small parties get? That is indeed a political curiosity.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.