YOU can win an election not on your own substance, but based on the circumstances that favour you. Had Jimmy Carter in 1980 concede the Democratic Party nomination to Edward Kennedy, Ronald Reagan would have been beaten badly. In 1980, a Kennedy name would not have lost.
In 2024, in the US, all the White liberals and White youths who voted for Barack Obama were gone from Kamala Harris. President Trump had a goldmine waiting for him. The American people were disgusted with the senility of Mr Biden. They thought the Democratic Party should have replaced him long before the election date.
Secondly, America was not prepared for a Black woman president. How the Democratic Party could not see that reality simply showed that these people in the West think they are better than the peoples in the Global South.
The Kamala Harris defeat showed that their intellectual substance that they have shoved down the throats of the post-colonial world is more brittle than the intellectual fibre of the Global South.
Let’s look at how politicians can win votes not because they are made of sound stuff, but because circumstances shaped fate to provide huge advantages to them. The fight for electoral victory in 2025 in Guyana should have been between the PPP and an entity named, APNU+AFC.
The prediction was that the PPP would win anyway. How good the APNU+AFC would have done was a ubiquitous curiosity. The presence and popularity of Irfaan Ali made a PPP loss virtually impossible. But as it turned out, there was no APNU+AFC and if there were, they would have been no WIN.
What happened in Guyana’s electoral politics last year is one of the saddest yet comical moments in the entire history of Guyana, both colonial and post-colonial. How did WIN come to have 16 seats?
An APNU+AFC coalition was what the anti-PPP voters wanted. Again, we must invoke the words of Vice-President Jagdeo. He said there were voters who didn’t want to vote for the PPP, but they didn’t want to give their votes to the PNC. Why? Here are brief notes on why that happened.
The AFC told the PNC that its leadership was not politically attractive in Guyana. The AFC suggested that it was best that the APNU join with the AFC and have a consensus candidate from outside the PNC. The PNC told the AFC that the PNC was the bigger, more historic party, therefore by numbers, it must have the presidential candidate and that person must be Aubrey Norton.
The AFC told the PNC that was a naive reading of Guyanese politics. The AFC told the PNC Norton was not electable. The PNC informed the AFC that if Norton was not electable, so was Nigel Hughes.
At that stage, both parties were right. Norton’s credibility had gone, but Hughes’ political standing in Guyana had disappeared. But the AFC proved more flexible. The AFC dropped Hughes’s candidacy in place of another consensus candidate from outside. The PNC said it had to be Norton, and Norton it must be.
At that stage in Guyanese politics in 2025, We Invest in Nationhood (WIN) received its trump card. What the opposition supporters and opposition voters wanted was an APNU+AFC ticket without Norton and Hughes.
They wanted something new, presentable and exciting. If the PNC and AFC had given opposition voters that new thing, there would never have been a WIN party.
Despite his money train that never stopped running during the election campaign, Azruddin Mohamed would have fallen by the wayside if there was an APNU+AFC entity with someone as the presidential candidate without baggage and coming from outside the perimeters and parameters on the PNC and the AFC.
The big story in Guyana in 2025 was the rise of WIN and what it did in three months that damaged the PNC. But there is more to this story and it needs to be told. There would have been no meteoric rise of WIN and the 16 seats it got would not have even been six had the PNC and AFC appeared as reasonable, credible people to their supporters.
Once more, Mr Jagdeo’s words reverberate. Mr Jagdeo said on election day, there were people who didn’t want to vote for the PPP, but couldn’t give their vote to the PNC.
The reason for this was when they looked at the PNC and the AFC and saw the failure to seek compromise, they went into a mental vortex. They couldn’t vote for the PPP but couldn’t vote for what the PNC had become. I think as a Pavlovian reflex, they chose WIN without WIN having anything going for it. That is why WIN will not survive beyond 2027.
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.
