Dear Editor,
The Alliance for Change (AFC) has taken a big political gamble in entering a pre-election coalition with A Partnership for National Unity (APNU). Some political analysts are of the view that it could very well be the end of the life of that political entity.
The fact is that unlike the United States and several other Western democracies there is not political space for swing voters. Any political blunder could prove costly if not fatal for parties on the periphery like the AFC. In our context, the two dominant political parties, namely the PPP and the PNC, have by and large managed over the decades to hold on to their respective support base, with the PPP having the distinction of being the only political party in post-independent Guyana that has been successful in winning a majority of the votes in all but the November 2011 election. That election gave the combined opposition a small margin of votes over that of the PPP. I refer of course to free and fair elections which effectively disqualifies the PNC during the 1968-1992 period. In other words, no political party except the PPP has ever won a majority of the votes on their own strength.
An analysis of voting behaviour would reveal that the PPP has always polled the highest number of votes since it entered electoral politics way back in the early 1950s. In the 1960s the PPP emerged as the party that commanded the largest bloc of votes until the 1964 elections when the PPP lost power through constitutional fiddling.
The PNC except for the elections of 2006 when it polled 35 per cent of votes never fell below 40 per cent which in effect meant that roughly 90 per cent of the total votes are shared between the PPP and the PNC.
Attempts by third parties to penetrate the electoral boundaries of the two dominant political parties have been met with great resistance if not hostility. This is why almost all of the smaller parties folded up after the elections were over, some never to reappear on the electoral stage after having been badly bruised in the rough and tough of electoral politics.
The AFC, to its credit, managed to pick up a few seats in the elections of 2006 and 2011 due in part to its promise of being a party that is independent of the centrifugal appeal of the major parties. Its pull in the elections of 2006 was largely Afro-centric and in the 2011 elections it lost that support but made up for the loss by making some inroads in some PPP strongholds.
It is clear that the AFC does not have a stable political base and its political fortunes depend on which way the political pendulum is swinging. Its support base is at best fluid and therefore unpredictable. Now that the AFC has merged with the APNU in a pre-election alliance, it can no longer present itself as a counter force to either of the two dominant political forces. Put in a different way, it has lost it raison d’être or its reason for being.
Yours faithfully,
Hydar Ally
