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IT started in America

Jan 13, 2023 Editorial

Kaieteur News – Though a little later in the calendar than Guyana’s, the trouble took hold, flourished, and keeps intensifying in America.  Thanks to the relentless, divisive, and inflammatory efforts of one Donald J. Trump, a former President of the United States no less, poisonous and passionate challenges to elections results are now the norm.

America, the so-called bastion of democracy, 50 States dedicated to liberty and a grand way of life, have now deteriorated into the ranks of what prevails in lesser countries.  Compliments of Mr. Trump and his diehard supporters to the far right, elections results are now not the end of a process, but the beginning of a war, a series of them that reaches into the streets, and all the way to the highest courts.

For its part, and here in the homeland, Guyana has always known a certain kind of national elections-those that are putrid and polarising and leave all gasping for breath and traction in their wash.  Guyana has had those that are stripped of the underpinnings of what is fair, factual, accurate, and right.  The PNC has earned the worst of reputations in this regard, and if the allegations are to be accepted as having substance, then the PPP has also helped itself to elections tricks and its own brands of stuffing and counting. This is what has made the rounds since March 2020, and has not let up to any degree, or in any lessening of sentiment in any section of Guyana. On several occasions in the harsh history of elections in Guyana, results have electrified participants to the point that there is a storming of the barricades, a dismissal of restraint, civility, and what it takes to be a real country.  These kinds of developments are what is expected in small, poor, undeveloped Third World countries backward and limited in what it is to conduct free and fair elections processes, and then having the graciousness and honesty to step back and admit to losing at the ballot box.  Nowadays, that is a thing of the past, and one with which more and more distance is placed.

Returning to the US, the recent midterms confirmed that the stakes are never less than high and at fever pitch, as can be attested to by reactions in places like Arizona, and to a lesser extent in other States.  Like pit bulls with blood in their nostrils, and flesh in their teeth, there is no letting go, no retreating, until the very last moment.  It does not matter what the people on the ground say, how clean the process was, or the transparent manner in which the entire exercise in democracy to capture the will of the people was managed and delivered.

This is what has unfolded right next door in big, boisterous Brazil. There it is Bolsonaro versus Lula, with the latter alleged to have engaged in rampant election frauds, leading to yet another storming of the gates by those who came up on the short side of the results to register their accumulated wrath. Here, we still have elections petitions before the Court, and those have not lost any steam, although it is now over two years since the last ballot was counted, the results declared final.

Taken together, from America to India to Guyana, and now with Brazil unsettled, elections no longer are about who should govern.  Rather, they are the opening salvos for the display of raw, pulsing energy across the nooks and corners of societies.  All are sucked in, none are spared, such is the irresistible magnetism of minds made up of what should be, and of which there is no tolerance for any other way.  As said earlier, this is the new norm that has seemingly established a stranglehold on process and participants. We have elections due in two years, and though nobody knows how that will shape up, and what forms the unfolding, it is almost a guarantee that there will be controversy, and issues about acceptability.  It does not take a prophet or a palm reader to arrive at that conclusion from now.  And with the presence of oil, there is now that most volatile and incendiary of elections fuels.

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