It must be the case that the president of Guyana has come to believe his own propaganda, for his behaviour in relation to the European Union’s final report on Guyana’s 2025 election has been too clumsy to be otherwise explained (‘President lambastes EU observers report’ SN: 20/11/2025)! After criticising the EU observers for not supporting their negative positions with suitable evidence and their unwillingness to declare that the election was ‘free’, President Ali, had to be corrected when he attempted to attach the PPP’s historic mantra: ‘all the foreign observer missions declared the elections free and fair’ to the 2025 election!
Understandably, Stabroek News appears to have been in the vanguard of those attempting to get some clarity from the EU presenters .for its editorials have been consistently peddling this falsity and so may well have been partly responsible of the president coming to believe his own propaganda.
For example, in its attempt to debunk one of Minister Gail Teixeira’s usual inaccuracies that Guyana’s comparatively short independent political history is substantially responsible for its autocratic status, a SN editorial concluded ‘Of course, no one is suggesting any analogy between this country and the authoritarian states; the government here was elected into office in a free and fair poll’ (SN; 16/11/2025).
Then two days later, an editorial titled ‘Political dissonance’ told us that ‘For Guyana’s democracy to truly mature, its citizens, particularly its most devoted supporters, must learn to sit with this dissonance and choose accountability over comfort’ (SN: 18/11/2025). Perhaps, because of the authors’ dissonance (i.e. a discomfort caused by inconsistencies: hypocrisy, mistake, etc which we are then motivated to try to reduce), the editorial sought to personalise rather than systemically locate the country’s intractable, political difficulties within its historical ethnic/political context!
A 2021 study suggests this complexity. ‘The broader context of consensus and inclusion are the underlying challenges for Guyanese citizens and impede the framing of a common vision of the country’s future. The ruling party and the opposition coalition need to find a way to form a functioning democracy. … There is not a vibrant and sizeable civil society that can contribute to national reconciliation, nor is there a national media that reaches citizens beyond the capital and coastal towns.
Consequently, there is no cohesive public pressure for substantive political or electoral reform stemming from the political crisis. International pressure on the two parties for better governance practices is not breaking the stalemate.’ (The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) ‘Democracy, Human Rights and Governance (DRG) Assessment of Guyana’. August 2021).
Election rigging involves gerrymandering, vote buying, candidate repression, digital hacking, multiple voting, duping the international community into legitimizing poor-quality polls, etc.. By election day 2025, the PPP had already violated all but some of those not directly relating to the day itself.
Furthermore, the regime had not fulfilled the important reforms the international community and Caricom recount group recommended, and which the opposition has been demanding in relation to the voters register, the introduction of biometrics, reorganisation of the Guyana Elections Commission, etc. Importantly, the latter was firmly in the hands of the PPP.
As a result, the EU’s present position should not have come as a surprise. Immediately upon hearing that the Carter Centre planed to deploy a small team of international experts to begin observing the pre-election period for the general and regional elections, this column argued that ‘The Centre, of all organisations, must know that unless some radical reforms or consensual adjustments take place, they are about to be involved in an electoral process that is so flawed it can only be democratically acceptable if the opposition wins (VV: ‘International monitoring rigged elections,’15/06/2025).
Some of those who have studied the issue of electoral manipulation have argued that rather than repeatedly monitoring and making reform recommendations that governments ignore, an effective system of international monitoring requires three main interventions to improve the prospects for protecting elections. In a nutshell, monitors need to:
(1) keep up with the technological times and deploy biometric technology, computer logs and storage, and expertise to give an indication of whether there is a hidden digital pattern of electoral manipulation,
(2) devise and implement a common set of standards and give joint statements to send a clear message to the ruling parties and (3) ensure that weaknesses they identify in the system are rectified and (importantly) refuse to monitor elections where this is not done (Cheeseman, Nicholas and Klaas, Brian -2018 – ‘How to rig an Elections,’ Yale University Press).
My comment above was rooted in a similar belief that monitors should not participate in elections in which the government has failed to implement important recommendations. However, the approach the EU adopted, namely participate and publicly confront the defaulters, is clearly a viable way forward for it is public education and one must now be very careful when referring to Guyana as a democracy.
Furthermore, one is tempted to argue in the current international environment of democratic backsliding that refusal to participate in the electoral process will more probably lead to reactionary realignments of counterfeit democrats as those in Guyana. The EU’s approach helps to clarify the boundaries of democratic participation and President Ali should also be thanked as his outburst has helped to universalise this message.
