Former People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) government minister and Village Voice News columnist Dr. Henry Jeffrey argues that President Irfaan Ali’s reaction to the European Union Election Observation Mission’s (EU-EOM) final report on Guyana’s 2025 General and Regional elections reveals a troubling dissonance between political narrative and documented findings.
In his column, “Thanks President Ali,” Jeffrey contends that the president’s criticisms of the EU mission suggest he has “come to believe his own propaganda,” particularly after Ali accused the observers of failing to substantiate their concerns and of refusing to declare the 2025 polls “free.” Jeffrey maintains that this led the president to inaccurately claim that the PPP/C’s longstanding mantra—“all the foreign observer missions declared the elections free and fair”—was once again applicable, a claim he says required correction.
Jeffrey also takes aim at Stabroek News, arguing that the newspaper’s editorials have inadvertently reinforced the government’s misrepresentation of the observer missions’ conclusions. He notes that SN “appears to have been in the vanguard of those attempting to get some clarity from the EU presenters… and so may well have been partly responsible of the president coming to believe his own propaganda.”
As examples, he cites an Editorial of 16 November 2025, which asserted: “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.” Two days later, another Editorial titled “Political dissonance” argued 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.” Jeffrey says this framing personalises political contradictions rather than locating Guyana’s entrenched electoral and governance problems within their long historical and ethnic context.
To demonstrate the structural dimensions of those problems, he cites the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) 2021 Democracy, Human Rights and Governance Assessment of Guyana, which concluded that “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 report observed that Guyana lacks “a vibrant and sizeable civil society that can contribute to national reconciliation,” and that the absence of a truly national media landscape prevents cohesive public pressure for political or electoral reform. It further found that “international pressure on the two parties for better governance practices is not breaking the stalemate.”
Jeffrey argues that by the time voters went to the polls in 2025, the PPP had already committed most of the forms of manipulation typically associated with electoral distortion, except those that occur strictly on election day. These, he says, include gerrymandering, vote buying, candidate repression, digital vulnerabilities, and attempts at “duping the international community into legitimising poor-quality polls.”
He adds that the government also failed to implement the reforms requested by the international community, CARICOM’s 2020 Recount Team, and the opposition—particularly the modernisation of the voters list, the introduction of biometrics, and the reorganisation of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), all of which fell under the administration’s responsibility
Given these unaddressed issues, Jeffrey argues that the EU’s final position should not have come as a surprise. He recalls warning earlier in June 2025, when the Carter Center signaled its intention to send a small expert team to observe the pre-election environment, that unless “some radical reforms or consensual adjustments” were made, international monitors risked becoming part of “an electoral process that is so flawed it can only be democratically acceptable if the opposition wins.”
To reinforce the point, Jeffrey references scholars Nicholas Cheeseman and Brian Klaas’s work, “How to Rig an Election,” which argues that meaningful international monitoring requires three interventions: modern technological tools to detect manipulation, a common set of standards backed by joint statements from observer missions, and refusal to observe elections where governments fail to correct identified weaknesses.
While he acknowledges that he previously favoured the refusal-to-observe approach, Jeffrey says the EU’s alternative—participating while publicly exposing deficiencies—has shown itself to be viable, particularly because it educates the public about the boundaries of democratic practice.
Jeffrey concludes that in the present global climate of democratic retreat, refusing to participate in imperfect elections may inadvertently strengthen “counterfeit democrats” who seek to exploit such withdrawal. He argues that the EU’s forthright approach has clarified the lines between democratic legitimacy and democratic pretense, and he adds that President Ali’s “outburst” has unintentionally helped “to universalise this message.”
