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THE PPP IS IN DENIAL

Dec 04, 2012 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

The results of the last elections should have led to serious introspection amongst all the political parties in Guyana. For all the parties that took part in the polls, including the AFC, the results of the elections represented bad news.
While APNU did recover from its disastrous performance in the 2006 polls, the party failed to match its performance at the 1992 elections.
And this was after there was an unprecedented turnout in the constituencies that normally vote heavily in favour of the PNCR, the main party in APNU.
From all the maths done — and APNU had a long time reconciling the statements of poll and studying the trends in all polling divisions– it must be clear to APNU and the PNCR that trying to win an election based solely on their core base, will not suffice.
The maths will show that even though the PPP underperformed in the elections and APNU’s supporters came out in their numbers, they were still unable to get anywhere near to the PPP, and will never perhaps be able to defeat the PPP with that sort of political strategy.
For APNU there has to be a rethink of just how it will proceed in the future but from all indications it really has no chance of ever closing the gap on the PPP.
For the PPP which won close to 49 per cent of the votes, the elections were a disaster. It was not just because of the fact that the party was unable to gain a majority. Even with 48 per cent, it still had a good chance of gaining a majority had it done well in some areas.
The fact that the PPP lost major ground in Region Six really hurt the PPP more than anything else.
The party had anticipated that it would have won easily because the opposition was lethargic between 2006 and 2011. But instead, the PPP lost crucial votes in critical areas.
This performance supports the long held theory by Mr. Robert Corbin, the former leader of the PNCR, who once said that the PNCR does not need to do anything to cause the PPP to decline; that the party will decline based on its own mistakes. Corbin was vindicated in the last elections on two counts.
He was vindicated on the count that the PPP will self- destruct and he was vindicated because the PNCR went into the election without him on the slate and still lost, proving that he was not the reason for the PNCR not winning the 2006 polls .
The AFC may feel that it did well because it increased the number of seats it holds in the National Assembly but the shocking development of the elections was that the AFC did not do as well as it may have anticipated in Region Four. Essentially it was abandoned by many of those who had supported it in this Region in the 2006 elections and had it not done hard work in Region Six, it would not have been in the position it is in today where it holds the deciding vote in parliament.
The AFC therefore like the PPP needs to rethink its strategy because five years will descend upon it very quickly and it will find that for all its histrionics in the National Assembly that it may lack an effective strategy to go into the next elections alone and may therefore have to join APNU, just like the WPA did, if it hopes to survive politically.
The AFC cannot discount what happened to it in Region Four where it should have done much better given its middle class orientation.
All the political parties therefore need to do some serious soul- searching and this past weekend there was an analysis done by the former Speaker of the National Assembly and former PPP member, Mr. Ralph Ramkarran, who analyzed, from his perspective, what went wrong with the PPP and suggested some areas for consideration.
While his analysis is deeply flawed and in fact impedes the case that he is making, this is the sort of discourse that is needed within the PPP.
The PPP has gone into denial about the elections and this is evident in the paranoid reaction to Ramkarran’s article.
There are those who refuse to accept that the market-oriented policies of the Jagdeo administration, the faithful adherence to international donor edicts and the arrogance which permeated its latter days in office were primarily responsible for it not gaining a majority.
But it is often hard for persons to accept they are wrong and this is where an independent perspective can be helpful. If the PPP continues to bury its head in the proverbial sand, it will not be able to reverse its losses at the last elections and, as Robert Corbin predicted, will disintegrate further.

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