The writing is on the wall for the PNCR

Jul 05, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – The PNCR is increasingly becoming less of a political party and more of a habit – a habit of disappointment. The party, now speaking loosely, through what was once APNU, has adopted the language of those who have exhausted the present and must therefore reimagine the past.

One hears, with increasing frequency, calls for a “grand coalition.” It is presented as strategy, as arithmetic, as necessity. But beneath those calls is a search for relevance, after the loss of it.

It is worth recalling that the earlier experiment in coalition-building, the partnership between APNU and AFC, did not collapse in a single moment of drama. It decayed. The decay was slow and therefore harder to admit. It was failure caused by greed and the erosion of trust.

There are always, in such coalitions, two kinds of suspicion. One is ideological, though ideology could hardly be the reason for the schisms in the coalition. The other was discontent over the distribution of the spoils of seats, ministries and influence.

Rupert Roopnaraine, the mastermind behind the establishment of the coalition, was removed from the Ministry of Education. The explanation whispered at the time was his health. But the real reason was greed: greed within the PNCR by elements who wanted to grab that Ministry at a time when the World Bank was about to disburse a massive loan. Elements within the PNCR wanted to be in command of how that project would be administered.

Within the coalition, there were always accusations of imbalance, of one partner taking more than its share of visibility and authority. The PNCR felt that the AFC got too much for less than the estimated 10% of the electorate it brought to the coalition. It had gotten 40% of the seats and a number of ministries and this meant that persons within the PNCR who were looking for positions were sidelined. This bred claims that the AFC got more than it deserved.

Even the presence of the WPA within the arrangement contributed another layer of instability. Its criticisms of its own government and the expressions of public dissatisfaction were interpreted not as internal dialogue but as betrayal. These suspicions, dissatisfaction and discontent hurt unity within the APNU+AFC government.

The result was that the coalition went into the 2020 elections as a divided house. In fact, the parting of ways took place as early as 2018 when the APNU and the AFC contested local government elections separately.

That was the beginning of the end.  The APNU+AFC lost the 2020 elections and tried to stay in office through dubious means.

By the time the 2025 elections came around, the divisions had become hardened. The failure to arrive at durable agreement with the AFC showed that the mistrust between the AFC and the PNCR had not mended, and in fact had spread.

In the 2025 elections, the AFC was wiped out as an electoral force and the PNCR suffered its most ignominious defeat ever, being reduced to a mere 12 seats in the National Assembly.

The emergence of WIN into the picture has only sharpened the sense of displacement. New movements always benefit from the exhaustion of older ones. They appear not merely as alternatives but as verdicts. In securing a significant parliamentary presence, WIN has not so much displaced its predecessors as exposed their accumulated fatigue.

It is in this context that the renewed call within the PNCR for a grand coalition  must be understood. It is less a strategy than a reflex. When a party has lost its ability to define the centre, it begins to imagine that the centre can still be assembled from fragments—provided enough fragments are gathered.

Yet coalition politics is not arithmetic alone. It requires a minimum of trust that cannot be reverse-engineered after repeated breakdowns. The problem is not that these actors cannot add together seats. It is that they cannot agree on what the sum is for.

There is also a harsher political reality at work. The PPP/C stands in as much a dilemma as the APNU. The PPP/C has a terminal illness called corruption and that has always been its undoing. WIN presents a real threat to the PPP/C going into the 2030 elections, and could take it all, like Mia Mottley did in Barbados.

Against this background, the call for a grand coalition becomes a kind of language of survival. It is what parties say when they fear that they will no longer even register as relevant actors in the country’s political future

And so, the grand coalition is proposed once more, as if history had not already tested its premise. It is offered not as renewal but as rescue. And rescue, in politics as in life, is rarely dignified.

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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• Peeping Tom, PNCR

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