Leader of the Opposition Mr. Audrey Norton believes that with a concerted effort the opposition could win the 2025 national and regional elections and there are no sound reasons to doubt him. What is not clear is if he believes he could win without the electoral reforms, particularly the new biometric-based electoral voters list the opposition has been requesting, and if the list is essential for his success and the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) remains reluctant to grant the opposition wishes, how they intend to achieve their goal.
Some of his supporters are suggesting that if a new list is not made available, his party should boycott the elections, and he is also on record as saying that the time is not ripe for street protest. But it does appear that if reform is essential and GECOM remains reluctant, some form of protest will be required.
The PPP has not convincingly won an election since 2006 so there is no good reason to question the opposition’s predictions. In 2011 it remained in government by way of the constitutional plurality rule that gives the government to the party that gains the largest number of votes; in 2015 it lost the elections that it claimed were rigged by APNU+AFC and their associates.
In 2020, after GECOM wrongly refused to consider claims that the PPP was involved in illegal procedures that, among other things, involved some 4,600 illegal votes, the PPP came back to government and elections petitions were filed but the substantive issues surrounding APNU+AFC coalition’s claims have not yet and most likely will never be dealt with legally.
Furthermore, elections fraud in Guyana is so widespread and victories so narrow that it makes little sense using the results of past elections to say anything meaningful about the possible outcome of future ones, apart from saying that it will be ethnically based. The so-called elections polls that are usually in the press are conducted by known PPP supporters with the sole intention of suppressing opposition support and enhancing that of the PPP.
That the electoral register is extremely bloated is accepted by all the very observers who certified the last elections, with warning against going to another election without this situation being rectified. Of course, the chairperson and PPP members on GECOM are refusing to support the introduction of biometrics and a new list, and if the opposition believes it could win without these changes, they should go full speed ahead. But there is a feeling among some of its supporters that the changes are essential to its success and that the opposition should boycott the elections if a new biometrically-based list is not in place.
National elections are usually boycotted to achieve political reforms and free and fair elections by reducing the legitimacy of the incumbent in the eyes of the domestic electorate and the international community. As is certainly the case in Guyana where the PPP and its fellow travellers have captured the state and use all manner of unfair methods of governance and electioneering, ‘elections in an authoritarian system tend to be unfree and unfair’, but simply boycotting them is considered a bad idea.
A worldwide study of 171 threatened and actual election boycotts between 1990 and 2009 showed that only about 4% could be considered relatively successful. However, the study found that a boycott such as is being considered in Guyana, is more likely to be successful if the elections receive a great deal of attention from the international community and if the boycott is accompanied by the opposition’s street protests. (https://www.brookings.edu/articles/threaten-but-participate-why-election-boycotts -are-a-bad-idea).
Among other things, Guyana’s decades-long ethnic polarisation, which has stultified shifts in public opinion and normal liberal democratic formation, has for some time caused the international community to become concerned with its struggle for democratisation. Indeed, if there was any doubt about the pressure the Joe Biden administration was placing upon the oligarchy of the PPP and its associates, their behaviour both immediately before and after the 2024 presidential election, where in Guyana we saw celebratory billboards supporting the Republican victory should have removed any such doubt.
The Joe Biden administration continued to cajole the regime in the direction of good governance and inclusivity. True, given that it framed its world view as a struggle between democracy and autocracy, its approach was somewhat more hands-on that previously. Some believe that it orchestrated the Su intervention that placed the PPP’s oligarchy in a permanent lock, forced a rethink of public service pay, visibly indicated where corruption and mismanagement are located and curtailed talk about snap elections, etc.
But the PPP’s response to the Republican victory also tells us that it does not care that its billboard signalled a level of national prostration that is most unbecoming of a sovereign nation, ran counter to our political tradition of even-handedness and noninterference in the political affairs of other nations, might unnecessarily anger our neighbour with whom we have a very active border problem and in the end only show total disrespect of the recipient of their praise with its public suggestion that autocracy had arrived in America.
For the PPP oligarchy, what was important was not the interest of the people of Guyana but its political and personal survival. That President Donald Trump recently reversed the oil license that allowed Chevron to operate in Venezuela because President Nicolas Maduro is not making progress on electoral reforms and migrant returns must be somewhat worrying.
Apart from its wealth, it is America’s ‘soft power’ resulting from the fact that it abhors dictatorship and hankers after social justice, democracy and the rule of law, that makes it so attractive to migrants of all sorts. Regardless of the autocratic tendencies the PPP may have detected in Trump’s behaviour, the competition between democracy and autocracy will not go away anytime soon and will continue to resonate in Guyana’s neighbourhood.
Indeed, according to The Lugar Centre Bipartisan Index, in 2013, Marco Rubio, the present Republican Secretary of State and the first Latin American to hold this position, was ranked the tenth most bipartisan out of the 100 senators. In 2020, the Chinese government sanctioned him twice and banned from entering China for condemning human rights abuses. In 2023 he was still well placed at number 40 and thus is very much aware of the nature of what is taking place in Guyana.
Given its pre-election behaviour, the PPP has already lost the forthcoming liberal democratic election but it long ago contented itself with its autocratic status. If the electoral success of the opposition depends on a new voters list based on biometrics, it must come to grips with the need for political struggle backed by effective protest and international support from the principals of the very observers that certified the 2020 elections in favour of the present autocratic regime.
