PPP, PNC, Macron, Le Pen: Crucial shades of differences

Apr 24, 2022 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – Tonight, the eyes of the world will be on France which will be explained below. There is a traditional suspicion among American non-White voters that the battle between the two big parties will never concern them because they are establishment machines that are power-driven, prisoners of moneyed people and emotionally are not ecstatic about America’s immigrant communities.
The election of Obama did not change that pattern. Once Obama was out, African-Americans saw the contest between Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump as none of their business. Mrs. Clinton lost because she did not pick up States where Blacks have large numbers. Black Americans did not root for Mrs. Clinton.
It was a tragic mistake. Even though, she is far less acceptable than Bernie Sanders, there are crucial differences between Clinton and Trump. Those dissimilarities are important based on your station in life and the colour of your skin. Mrs. Clinton’s organisation, the Democratic Party is a more morally superior and ideologically better entity than the Republican Party. Its policies will favour the poor and the non-White than if the Republicans were in power.
Certain groups and individuals among the Guyanese nationality with a sad agenda because of their sad psychology say all kinds of nonsense in this country about its democratic status. But the world’s major democracies have legal and constitutional structures that may not be in sync with what is the ideal type of democracy.
In France, political parties cannot participate in a general election as in Guyana. Only two parties can do so. In Guyana, 20 parties can contest. In France, all parties have to enter a first round and only two with the highest votes are allowed to fight for office. So if three parties compete; one gets 24 percent, another 22 and another 21, the party that got 21 percent becomes dead as a door nail. That is not democracy.
People around the world who are liberal, left-wing, socialist and working class oriented see little difference between President Macron and his only rival in today’s contest, Marie Le Pen. But in politics, there are shades of differences between political parties and their leaders that are extremely important to the particular country and the world.
I would not vote for Macron in most circumstances. He is a right-wing, pro-business, anti-working class president but contextually, I would vote for him. The context is who his opponent is. You will see shades of differences today in France. Le Pen is an extremist, right-wing populist who is anti-Muslim, anti-Africa, anti-Third World. Le Pen wins and non-White people will be mashed up in France. Today, the French people hardly have a choice. But there are crucial shades of differences between him and Le Pen and they should vote for Macron.
In Guyana, it is fashionable among the usual suspects, the mullato ethnic community, westernised non-Muslim, non-Hindu Guyanese Indians and the academics that belong to those strata to perpetuate the paradigm that there are no dissimilarities between the PNC and PPP. They have argued since Independence that both parties are power-driven and serve ethnic interests.
This paradigm gained immense coverage in Guyana when the intellectuals in the Creole middle class at the beginning of the 1970s formed a UG based group name Ratoon and a pressure group named the Movement Against Oppression (MAO).
The theory that there were no dissimilarities between the PPP and the PNC took up permanent residence in Georgetown (not the countryside) when Ratoon, MAO, and other groupings including A SCRIA under Eusi Kwayana formed the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) in 1974. Even Walter Rodney maintained his distance from the PPP in those days.
The WPA’s stuck record was that the two big parties are the same; there is need for a third force. The WPA died in the early nineties and the Alliance For Change (AFC) was born. The AFC was successful in persuading large sections that there must be a third force because the PPP and PNC are identical.
Even though the third force prove to be degenerate in power between 2015 and 2020, the old paradigm of the two being identical persists, the latest being an article by two pro-third force academics – Drs. Alissa Trotz and Arif Bulkan. They see the two parties as versions of each other. Moray House endorsed the theory of Trotz and Bulkan.
There are crucial philosophical, ontological and existentialist and ideological differences between the PNC and PPP and their leaders. The PPP is by far a more grounded political reality where the willingness to use violence as a way of life as adumbrated by Machiavelli is far less pronounced than in the PNC. The PNC does not believe in the alternative possession or rotation of power and has an inherent tendency to see violence as the final solution.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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