The die is cast; there will be a winner in 2015

Feb 18, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Before last Saturday, the talk all over Guyana was there would be a minority government for the second time after May. Some people saw the PPP as getting more votes than the AFC and APNU separately, with reduced seats, but nevertheless winning the presidency.
Many observers feel this time APNU will get out their voters all over Guyana and will win the presidency. All that is now dead and buried. There will be a majority government after May 11. There will be many crazy little parties contesting, but people will dismiss them. There will be a straight fight between the PPP and the APNU-AFC coalition.
Any commentator will be asked for his/her views on the outcome of an election. I could have predicted the winner in Greece. I believe Mrs. Clinton, if she runs, will be the next American President. There is only one office that the Americans vote nationally for; it is the presidency. Outside of that there are only district candidates for the House of Representatives and state races for the Senate. The American people will not elect a Republican President in 2016.
My prediction is that Labour will win this year in the UK, but it will be a narrow victory. The Lib-Dems will be devastated with the Conservatives barely losing. In Trinidad, I think it is too close to predict re-election for Mrs. Persad-Bissesar.
Who will win in Guyana? As an analyst, I would say long incumbency has its weaknesses.
The PPP has been in power too long, but unlike Owen Arthur in Barbados, whose incumbency was unstained yet he lost, the PPP’s sordid balance sheet is likely to be an insurmountable cliff. Voters generally do not like protracted incumbency. The Germans gave Merkel a minority government and I doubt Merkel will run again.
In Guyana, it is not the extensive tenure of the PPP that may undo it, but the contents of that tenure. The twenty-two years of PPP’s rule has been punctuated by depravities, abuses and corruption that are unspeakable. These atrocities are not episodic; they are almost daily occurrences.
The nation goes to bed and can expect to wake up the next morning and be greeted with another scandal deep within the bowels of the PPP Government. Can the coalition between the AFC and APNU defeat the PPP? My analytical answer is yes. Naturally I am expected to explain why, without bringing into the equation the insanities of the long nights of the PPP.
I think the coalition has very few historic parallels. There may be no parallels at all. In 1950, there was no Indian party that was the racial rival of an African party. It was a nationalist movement of anti-colonial leaders. When the PPP spilt in 1955, it was only then that an Indian formation and African organization were born. Since then there has been no phenomenal ethnic or political accommodation of the status of last Saturday’s coalition between the AFC and APNU.
The 1964 joint government of the United Force and the PNC was anything but historic.
No historian or analyst of the day saw it as a historic milestone. It was a marriage of convenience between two entities that had only one thing in common – the need to remove the Jagan Government.
The second event that came close to being historic was the Patriotic Coalition for Democracy that just imploded as the 1992 election drew nearer. The third development that could be given some contextual importance was the unity slate of the PNC and WPA to contest the 2011 elections. It lacked phenomenal value because it did not cement racial unity.
The WPA had no substantial constituencies, in fact it may have had no constituency at all, but it brought to the PNC its symbol of integrity and nationalist politics which still runs deep in the soul of sections of African Guyanese. The PNC-WPA reconciliation was a healing within the African communities, and that explains its loss at the polls in 2011. The unity platform didn’t signify ethnic embrace.
This is where the coalition between the AFC and APNU stands out as a historic event. What the coalition means to vast sections of this country is that African and Indian leadership are prepared to abandon race competition and work within the spirit of nationalist harmony for the future of Guyana.
Most African-Guyanese see the PNC as their party and see the AFC as more Indian in content than multi-racial. Most Indian-Guyanese see the PNC as an African party and the AFC as having trusted top-class Indian leadership. The coalition then symbolizes the end of racial suspicion. That may carry the coalition to victory.

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The die is cast; there will be a winner in 2015

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