The Alliance For Change (AFC) yesterday said that it will hold the balance of power in the next parliament saying that no party is likely to win a majority when GECOM makes the official announcement about the winner of Monday’s poll.
“Clearly the AFC will hold the balance of power at these elections,” AFC presidential candidate Khemraj Ramjattan said at a press briefing at the Pegasus Hotel. He said that at this stage, the AFC will not be teaming up with any of the parties that are likely to be in the National Assembly when the results are announced. “At this stage, we are not making any deals,” Ramjattan said. “We would like to assure the electorate that their will in Parliament will be that which we are going to proceed with,” he said.
AFC prime ministerial candidate Raphael Trotman said that based on results so far it is unlikely that any party will get a majority. “If no one party has won 50 percent or 51 percent of the votes it does usher in a whole new dispensation in the sense of a new political order of us having to sit together as responsible leaders to work out issues that confront the people of Guyana,” Trotman said. He identified power, crime, corruption and racism as some of the issues.
Trotman called on GECOM to immediately release the results of the elections saying that tensions are high. The party, he said, had formally written to GECOM requesting this. He said that there were indications that GECOM was not as ready for these elections as it had said. “We are quite distressed and disturbed at GECOM’s inadequacies because we were told that GECOM was ready. There was a touch…of arrogance that I had seen and yet 48 hours after there was no result to be given…,” Trotman said, adding that the delay in the release of results was causing tensions to rise unnecessarily.
He said that the party is satisfied with how the commission performed in the lead up to the elections but declined to pronounce on the Commission’s performance during the elections. “The jury is still out on GECOM,” Trotman said in relation to the commission’s performance after the polls.
The AFC, he said, will subject itself to GECOM’s results providing that there are not any glaring irregularities. “We largely trust the system. It will have its hiccups but we feel that the political will of the Guyanese electorate will emerge through the results,” Ramjattan said.
