The consolations of defeat

Sep 03, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – It is one thing to lose an election, and quite another to lose it badly. The distinction, though seemingly semantic, is political to its marrow.

A narrow loss allows a leader to walk away with dignity intact, to proclaim that history turned on the toss of a coin, that the campaign was “competitive.” But a collapse, measured against one’s own past performances, strips away the veils. It leaves nothing but the naked verdict of the electorate, a judgment not of chance but of character.

In most functioning democracies there exists an unwritten law, more binding than statute. When a leader is defeated, he or she offers to step aside. It is the leader’s final service to the party, an act of accountability toward those who invested their trust. One resigns not out of vanity wounded but out of respect for the membership, and for the principle that leadership is borrowed, not owned.

But here in the Third World, where politics often resembles a kind of medieval court, that unwritten law is too often ignored. Leaders move not as custodians but as proprietors, convinced they have transport over the party. They cling to the trappings of office with the devotion of a miser to his coins, convinced that their departure would trigger the collapse of the heavens.

The favoured excuse, of course, is fraud. A leader who has been trounced by twenty points will insist, without evidence, that the people’s will has been stolen. This fiction, once uttered, requires no proof; it thrives on the faith of the gullible and the desperation of the loyal. Every irregularity, however minor, is magnified into conspiracy. Every rumour is recast as fact. In this way, defeat is not acknowledged but postponed, deferred indefinitely in the collective imagination of the faithful.

Another stratagem is the manufacture of false hope. The defeated leader insists that “the numbers are still coming in,” and that “the recount will show a different story.” Hours turn into days, the defeat calcifies into permanence, yet still the leader offers the palliative of optimism. The membership, starved for a miracle, clings to the possibility that tomorrow will undo yesterday.

Contemporary politics offers further refinements to the art of denial. One is the scapegoat: blame the media, the electoral commission, and if needs be even the weather.  Blame, if need be, the voters themselves for failing to appreciate greatness when it was paraded before them. Another is the martyrdom strategy, in which the leader presents himself not as loser but as victim, persecuted by hostile internal elites, betrayed by traitors within, undermined by foreign interests. In this narrative, defeat becomes a badge of honour, proof of courage against impossible odds.

All these stratagems are aimed at moving attention away from the shortcomings of the leaders towards others. In so doing, they shift the burden of failure from the captain at the helm to the storm, the crew, or even the ship itself, anything but the hand that steered it into disaster.

Donald Trump, to take the most prominent example, has made of this strategy an entire political career. He lost the 2020 U.S. presidential election, and lost it badly in the key battlegrounds, yet has persuaded millions that he was robbed. The claim requires no evidence because it was never about evidence; it was about preserving himself in office and, failing that, in relevance. The lie, repeated often enough, becomes not fact but faith, a loyalty test separating true believers from the apostate.

Nor is this pathology confined to the Western hemisphere. Consider Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, who outstayed both his welcome and his competence by decades, justifying each loss of legitimacy with tales of Western plots and imperial sabotage. Or the succession of other leaders who, even in the face of electoral humiliation, hint that “the numbers were manipulated,” thereby offering their followers a reason to wait for a comeback that never comes.

Yet against these techniques stand forces no leader can forever resist. Parties, unlike monarchies, do not thrive on the immortality of one man. They require renewal, the constant infusion of new faces, new energies, new visions. When a leader refuses to step aside after defeat, the party itself ossifies. The membership grows weary of excuses, the younger generation turns elsewhere, and the machinery of politics moves on without the self-appointed custodian at its head.

The truth, unpleasant but necessary, is that the best of us lose from time to time. Churchill was cast aside after victory in World War II, Nehru’s Congress lost after decades of rule, and in the United States even the great incumbents such as Adams, Hoover, and Carter were shown the door by an electorate that preferred other options. If greatness does not exempt one from the verdict of the ballot, then how much less should those who never demonstrated an ability to lead claim immunity?

To lose badly is to hear, in the most unmistakable terms, the voice of the people saying “enough is enough”. It is not a tragedy but a reckoning. Leaders who respect their parties, their supporters, and themselves understand that such moments call for grace, for the willingness to step into the political sunset with head held high. To cling to office after such a verdict is not to demonstrate strength but to confess weakness, to admit that one’s only talent lies in survival. In the end, the measure of leadership is not how long one holds on but how one lets go.

(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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• consolations, defeat, Peeping Tom, political

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