The titans are mortal

Sep 07, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – The People’s Progressive Party has been at this game too long not to know the rules. It knows that its own survival is bound up in the fortunes of the People’s National Congress. It is not enough to win. It must have the old enemy to win against. Without the PNC, the PPP is a performer without a stage, a priest without a devil to exorcise.

This just-concluded election should have brought unqualified joy. A landslide. A crushing of the PNCR. But Bharrat Jagdeo, who has the nose for politics like a shark has for blood, knows better. He knows that the present euphoria is thin. He knows that the weakening of the PNCR is the beginning of a slow wasting for the PPP. For what is the PPP without its tribal adversary? What becomes of its slogans, its campaigns, its promises of protection, if the bogeyman no longer exists?

The PNCR has been reduced to its bones. It was once a colossus, capable of thirty-one seats with the AFC as ballast. Now it stands at twelve. Twelve is a humiliation. A defeat so complete it is closer to disappearance than to setback. The euphemism of “APNU” cannot disguise the rot. The voters have withdrawn faith. The party is at its weakest, its base confused, its leadership exposed as hollow men.

Yet here lies the paradox; in the weakness of the PNCR, the PPPC too is diminished. Its own voters are stirred to loyalty not by policy but by fear—fear of what the PNCR might do, what the PNCR has done, what the PNCR threatens to become, what the return of the PNC to office promises.

Take away that fear and the PPPC has no lever. A weak PNCR means complacency among PPP supporters. It means a major source of insecurity is removed. They will not turn out in their numbers. They will not believe that the party is in danger. The PPPC, therefore, needs the PNC. Jagdeo knows it. He cannot say it, but he knows it in his bones.

This explains the curious statement of the PPP’s General Secretary—that he prefers to deal with the PNCR rather than with WIN. It may be dismissed as diplomatic flattery for the Americans. But the remark was darker. It was the confession of a dilemma. A weak PNCR leaves the PPPC without an adversary, and without an adversary, the PPPC has no reason to exist.

It must therefore make the PNCR appear strong and still important, even when it is broken. Without that theatre, the PPPC cannot sustain itself.

And into this vacuum has stepped WIN. A ragged movement of the lumpen proletariat, without theory, without strategy, but with the one thing that matters in politics: numbers. They have pried open the closed circle of two-party politics. They have shown that the titans are mortal.

WIN has not yet grasped the enormity of what it has achieved. In a single election, it has broken the backbone of one of the strangest political parties in the English-speaking Caribbean. But even more than that, WIN has sent tremors of fear through the rival camp, the PPPC, which suddenly sees in this upstart movement the possibility of an adversary unshackled from the old loyalties on which it has built its strength. By accident or design, WIN has destabilized the very foundation of Guyana’s two-party order, and in doing so has forced both titans to reckon with the reality that their duopoly is no longer secure.

In WIN’s success lies the seed of a greater destruction. If they endure, if they acquire leadership with vision, they could spell the end not just of the PNCR but of the PPPC as well.

But WIN is not built for endurance. It appears now that its leaders imagined that politics was about seizing the presidency, like a sugar estate or a co-operative society. They did not imagine five years. They did not imagine twenty. They imagined only conquest. Now that they have been denied it, they are at sea, leaderless, rudderless, clueless, squabbling over imagined irregularities.

And yet Jagdeo cannot sleep easy. For he knows history does not demand wisdom from its usurpers. It demands only appetite. The appetite exists. The lumpen are restless. The PNCR has been decimated. In five years’ time, the PPPC may discover that the theatre is gone, that the adversary is gone, and that it stands naked before WIN, stripped of its one great advantage: fear.

The PPPC’s victory, then, may be its undoing. Jagdeo knows this. He smiles, he celebrates, but he knows. The enemy that gave him his power is dying. And without the PNCR, the PPPC too will die.

(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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• mortal, Peeping Tom, People's National Congress, PNC, PPP, PPPC, Titans

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