The Mudslide Victory

Sep 29, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – The People’s Progressive Party Civic has won the 2025 elections. But it did so in the manner of a gambler who spends a fortune on the roulette wheel to walk away with a few chips clinking in his pocket.

Technically, it was a landslide. A victory margin of ten percent or more is the definition of a landslide. But to look at the results without the varnish of official pronouncements is to recognise something far less flattering. What the PPP achieved was not a landslide but a mudslide, the kind that buries a village under the weight of its own excess, leaving behind wreckage instead of renewal.

Despite holding the high ground of incumbency, despite the parade of ribbon cuttings and photo opportunities at freshly built schools, hospitals, and water treatment plants, despite a cash grant giveaway, the PPPC emerged with fewer than 10,000 more votes than in 2020. And considering there was 37,000 plus new voters to only win by 10,000 more votes than in 2020 shows that the PPPC underperformed. You cannot blame the low voter turnout because in terms of numbers it was only 22,000 persons less that voted in 2025 than in 2020.

Five years of unprecedented oil-fueled growth, five years of unrelenting spending, and the reward: a marginal improvement that reeks of political stagnation. Five years of handouts; five years of building roads and other infrastructure; five years and yet the growth of PPPC votes over that of 2020 was just more than 9,000. The leadership will, of course, declare victory in booming tones. The surrogates will remind us that the nation has never seen such economic expansion, never witnessed such infrastructural development. But the returns speak louder than the campaign boasts. After building an empire of concrete and asphalt, after dangling cash and campaign promises, the party managed only a trickle of additional support.

The much-vaunted party machinery including the newly formed party clusters, the operatives and the tents outside of the polling stations, all proved incompetent. In East Berbice, the party lost votes compared to 2020. Voters in strongholds stayed home, indifferent, unconvinced, or simply weary of promises that trickle upwards to the oligarchs and foreign contractors but never seep down to the small man in the market, the clerk in the offices, the cane-cutter whose sweat once oiled the party’s engine.

What explains this failure? The answer lies in the concentration of power at the top, a leadership that brooks no dissent and tolerates no debate. One man is assumed to dictate policy with the air of divine right. The clusters were never vibrant because the spirit of collective action has been smothered by political opportunism and personal ambition. Clusters cannot replace the traditional grassroots activism of the party. It cannot erase the mistrust by the supporters of its leadership who roll up to see the faithful in the Prados, and who speak to them from a head table and lectern.

And here lies the real danger. The electorate, even when cowed by tribal loyalty, is not blind. They can see the widening gulf between the promises of inclusivity and the practice of exclusion. They can measure the distance between the grand speeches about prosperity and the barren reality of rising costs of living. They can feel, in their empty pockets, the betrayal of a government that courts billion-dollar investors but ignores the indigence of the very people who voted it into power. They see also political grasshoppers being rewarded at the expense of the loyal faithful.

For the PPPC, the message of this election is clear. The strategy of governing for the few while pretending to govern for the many has reached its limit. The benefits of growth have not filtered down; they have been siphoned off, concentrated in the hands of contractors, cronies, and the nouveaux riches while the poor still remain with bowl in hand waiting for the infrequent cash grants.

The PPP’s poor showing, masked as a landslide, is not a reflection of its strength. Rather, it is a warning of its fragility. A government that treats the small man as an afterthought risks not only political erosion but eventual political collapse. A party that forgets its roots in the struggles of sugar workers and farmers will find, soon enough, that those roots have withered.

If the leadership does not reverse course—if it continues to conflate economic growth with social justice, to confuse infrastructure with equity, to mistake handouts for empowerment—then the mudslide of this election may well become the landslide of the next, sweeping the party from power.

The PPP is standing on shifting ground, but instead of shoring up its foundations among the people, it is building towers for the elite. It is an old story, and it always ends the same: with defeat and humiliation. The party has its victory, but it is a hollow victory. The election results do not celebrate the PPP’s dominance; they expose its decline. And unless the party listens to the whispers of discontent buried in the numbers, the mudslide it now dismisses will become the avalanche it cannot stop.

(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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• Guyana 2025 elections, landslide victory, Mudslide Victory, Peeping Tom, PPPC

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