FOR the coming week, I will devote this page to the analysis of the 2025 election results, but I will not do it sequentially to bore readers.
I break tomorrow to look at the future legacy of President Ali, and resume on Monday, but delve into another topic for Tuesday.
Today, I want to look at the impossible task of assessing how a particular social class voted in the recent election. In Guyana, because of the Proportional Representation system, you can only assess how ethnic groups voted, but not how social classes balloted.

This is not so in the United States, where it has the First-Past-The-Post System (FPTP). Under this mode of election, you can tell who the bourgeoisie voted for among competing parties, because there are untold numbers of suburbs in the US where the super-rich are concentrated.
In Guyana, the Statements of Poll can detect racially-motivated voting, because, in this country, there are entire districts in which 95 per cent of the population is of one particular racial grouping.

This is almost impossible in terms of class voting. In Guyana, working-class districts and middle-class areas fall into the same polling division. So, in Turkeyen where I live and where you have working class, lower middle-class and upper middle-class folks, it is difficult to tell how social classes voted.
What I have done for this article here is look at the class composition of the parties to glean who the Mulatto/Creole class (MCC) chose. I think there were four parties that did not attract the interest of the middle classes, only – PPP, PNC, WIN and the ALP of Simona Broomes. Those four parties received the votes of the proletariat, lower peasantry, and lumpen proletariat. I would think that the PPP did secure the votes of middle-class Indians.

And the PNC would have secured the votes of some lower middle-class Africans who, because of dark complexion are not part of the MCC. Even though Terrance Campbell is a quintessential member of the MCC, I think the MCC did not vote for him because he gravitated to Aubrey Norton days before the election.

Any amateur analyst would know that the MCC parted company with the PNC after Norton became its leader, and wanted nothing to do with Norton and the PNC leadership. This explains that when the MCC resurrected the Alliance For Change (AFC) under Nigel Hughes, it openly rejected a Norton leadership in an APNU+AFC alliance.
The two entities that appeared to have the MCC’s favour were the Nigel Hughes-led AFC and Amanza Walton-Desir’s Forward Guyana. Both were led by middle-class politicians whose parties the Guyanese people perceived as middle-class outfits.

The AFC got 3,610 ballots, and 4,326 Xs went to Forward Guyana. The amount was 8,000 ballots. I doubt the 1,000 Xs that Broomes got came from even the lower middle-class. Ms. Desir has won a seat and is going to parliament.

With 22,000 less citizens voting this year when compared to 2020, you have to include a significant amount in that absentee group as belonging to the MCC. It is difficult to come up with an exact figure of how much MCC folks are in that 22,000-absentee school.
But I believe the exodus of Ms. Desir, and the failure of an APNU+AFC marriage induced pessimism among the MCC about the election, and they figured that the two MCC parties would not have a good showing, and they stayed home.

MCC folks also stayed home because the huge voices in the MCC in Guyana did not go vocal for the AFC and Forward Guyana.
The Stabroek News, Red Thread, SASOD, Alissa Trotz, Isabelle DeCaires, Nigel Westmaas, Transparency Institute -Guyana and the Guyana Human Rights Association were silent with the Stabroek News doing serious injury to Nigel Hughes and Ms. Desir by subtly supporting WIN.

If you look at the way GECOM did its calculation to give Ms. Desir a parliamentary seat, if the MCC had turned up in large numbers, maybe the AFC could have received a seat at the expense of the PNC. But what the 2025 election results show is that the MCC is not a peripheral social stratum in Guyana. It has status, money and numbers, but as a social class, its politics has been a failure even when it attained office in 2015. Where this class goes from here-on is unpredictable. The AFC will not survive beyond 2026. The MCC would not touch Forward Guyana, because the MCC would find people like Dorwin Bess and Nigel London politically unpalatable. It could form another party for 2030, or the MCC may quit politics altogether.

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.