The PPP/C’s greatest liability

Feb 03, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

---

Peeping Tom

Kaieteur News- One might have expected that a ruling party basking in the largesse of oil wealth would chart a course toward renewal and substantive remake of the country’s political governance. Instead, the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) clings to an antiquated playbook, peddling nostalgia for fear and dredging up ghosts of elections past. With all the resources at its disposal, the party has chosen a campaign of selective amnesia and moral indignation, rather than substantive policy and vision.

The PPP/C’s electoral strategy hinges on two axes: first, the perpetuation of the APNU+AFC’s complicity in the attempted rigging of the 2020 elections, and second, the economic failures of the APNU+AFC government between 2015 and 2020. Both are flimsy pillars on which to rest a political future, let alone one seeking a landslide. For a party brimming with state resources and an economy buoyed by oil wealth, it is telling that the best it can offer is the stoking of old anxieties.

The first prong of this strategy—that of keeping the ghost of electoral fraud alive—is riddled with miscalculations. The PPP/C assumes that the electorate will be mobilized by moral outrage against the APNU+AFC’s blatant attempt to cling to power.

This is a fantasy. In the United States, the Democrats believed that Trump’s flagrant assaults on democracy, culminating in the January 6th insurrection, would translate into widespread revulsion at the ballot box. It did not. Instead, the Republican base remained largely intact, and the electoral impact of Trump’s many transgressions was, at best, negligible.

Guyana’s political landscape is no different. The PPP/C can flood the airwaves with reminders of APNU+AFC’s electoral misdeeds, but most of the Coalition’s supporters are unlikely to be persuaded to give their votes to the PPPC. In fact, there exists an uncomfortable truth the PPPC refuses to acknowledge: many within the opposition’s base would not have objected had APNU+AFC successfully rigged the election. This is the nature of local politics. The PPPC’s assumption that it can fracture the opposition’s base by appealing to a sense of democratic purity is naïve. Worse yet, it highlights a deep detachment from political realities.

The second aspect of the PPP/C’s strategy—capitalising on the economic failures of the APNU+AFC government—is similarly flawed. The party’s economic critique of the opposition hinges on comparisons that ignore vastly different contexts. The APNU+AFC governed in an era before oil revenues transformed Guyana’s fiscal space.

Any governing party without billions in oil windfalls would have struggled under the same conditions. The PPP/C, despite its self-congratulatory rhetoric, is fighting an opponent that never had access to the tools of prosperity the PPP/C now wields. In this light, its economic superiority is an illusion of circumstance rather than a triumph of governance. Yet, despite the glaring weaknesses of its campaign strategy, the PPP/C enjoys one clear advantage: its youthful figurehead, President Irfaan Ali. Ali stands out as a fresh, energetic face, one capable of connecting with a younger electorate. His nationwide engagements and tireless public appearances are a study in political endurance. If the PPP/C secures re-election, it will not be because of its myopic electoral strategy, but in spite of it. The PPP/C’s victory will be won on the back of a president who, unlike his predecessors, can still claim to be in touch with the pulse of the people. The PPP/C’s biggest liability is not its opponent but the albatross around its neck—Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo. For all of Ali’s dynamism, his government is still shackled to the omnipresence of a political relic whose weekly diatribes and erratic pronouncements threaten to do more harm than good.

If Ali is the party’s greatest electoral asset, Jagdeo is its most glaring vulnerability. His tirades and imperious attitude make for excellent fodder in the opposition’s counter-narrative. Every time he lashes out at the press or delivers another of his condescending diatribes, he gives greater publicity, relevance and credence to his party’s rivals.

Jagdeo’s presence exposes another contradiction within the PPP/C’s strategy: it rails against the spectre of a PNCR dictatorship while simultaneously elevating a figure whose own tenure was marked by controversies. The irony is lost only on those who refuse to see it.

Most voters are too young to remember the burnished horrors of the 1980s. As such, the more immediate memory of political arrogance and high-handedness comes not from the opposition, but from the PPP/C itself.

The PPP/C’s campaign therefore is one of contradictions, rooted in a strategy that presumes a politically unsophisticated electorate. It overestimates the impact of moral indignation and underestimates the resilience of political tribalism. It pretends that economic comparisons between oil-rich Guyana in 2024 and pre-oil Guyana in 2019 are meaningful. It sells the illusion of democratic purity while parading figures whose pasts are riddled with their own controversies. And in its attempt to consolidate its grip on power, it ignores the internal discontent that Jagdeo’s continued dominance fosters.

There remains, however, one certainty: the PPP/C will win the next election. The opposition is devoid of momentum. But the scale of the PPP/C’s victory is what remains uncertain.

The PPP/C’s chosen strategy will not yield a landslide. It will, at best, secure another narrow majority—an outcome that should, if the party had any introspection left, prompt serious reconsideration. But if history is any guide, the party will instead misread the results, seeing in them an endorsement of its tactics rather than an indictment of its failures.

(The PPP/C’s greatest liability)

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

 

---

• campaign, oil wealth, Peeping Tom, political governance, selective amnesia

---