It happens to all parties eventually, especially those which have been in power for extended periods. It happened to the PNC, and now it is happening to the PPP. Since it has been voted out of office it is displaying symptoms of being under stress and lacking cohesion, while to onlookers, it also appears directionless.
Guyana’s traditional ethno-political landscape was closely associated with two men – Forbes Burnham and Cheddi Jagan ‒ and by extension with their immediate associates and successors, Desmond Hoyte and Janet Jagan. Nothing much was likely to change until that generation of giants had passed on, although on its own it would have been insufficient to accomplish a reshaping of the political terrain. As it is, however, the older cadre of leaders has now gone, in addition to which there has been a demographic shift, although information on how large that shift has been will have to await the publication of full census results.
Nevertheless, it is clear it was sufficiently large to deny the PPP/C a parliamentary majority in national elections in 2011, and the presidency as well in the one earlier this year. In other words, the days of the PPP’s built-in dominance of the vote by virtue of ethnic superiority are unquestionably over. It is no secret that after the 1997 election, they came increasingly to depend on the Amerindian vote to secure an overall majority, although even that was not enough for the purposes of the May election.
So now they find themselves in something of a political vacuum, unable to adjust to being out of power, and with the only figure who stands out being a source of division within the party. For many decades Cheddi and Janet Jagan did not cultivate successors, and when Mrs Jagan did identify someone, she probably made the same mistake that senior members of the Tory party in Britain made when they selected Mrs Thatcher as party leader. They thought that they could manipulate Mrs Thatcher if she got into office, although it did not take long for the enormity of their mistake to dawn on them.
In Mrs Jagan’s case, she may have calculated that her protégé Bharrat Jagdeo, owing to youth and inexperience, would respond to guidance, if not instructions. He was careful for a good while, but it gradually became apparent that he had his own approach which did not accord with that of some of the older hands in the party, in addition to which he had no qualms about releasing himself from his mentor’s tutelage.
There may have been dissatisfaction with Mr Jagdeo for a long time in Freedom House, but he has a personality which tends to fill all the available political space, and in any case, when he was president he commanded a tremendous amount of power and was in a position to dispense perks. The grumbling may have become more obvious during the period when Mr Donald Ramotar was president, because Mr Jagdeo was no longer in the driving seat, although the public perception was that the former was under the control of the latter.
But now with the loss of two elections (although not the presidency in the first instance), and with Mr Jagdeo being the lead campaigner in both, the rifts in the opposition are more on display. Mr Jagdeo’s crude campaign and appeal to raw ethnic issues was blamed by some for the electoral defeats, although that may not be the whole truth. Certainly, the sour campaign he ran brought out the base, but this was likely done at the expense of repelling a small floating vote. It is that vote which brought the coalition into office, and it may yet come to play a greater role in subsequent national elections. Whether a less offensive PPP campaign could still have brought out the base while attracting a proportion of the floating vote, is a question which will never be answered.
The floating vote – for want of a better term – is multiethnic and therefore looks primarily at issues. It is probably largely urban based, and if not really coterminous with civil society, is at least well represented there. In fact, having played a part in voting out what always seemed to be the impregnable PPP, civil society is creating the space to have its views heard, as the coalition is learning to its cost. For the senior ranks of the PPP, civil society and the floating vote does not exist, but traditionally, of course, the only reality for them has been the one which finds expression inside the walls of Freedom House. They have always had difficulty seeing anything in the local political universe beyond those walls which is not the PNC or which they deem connected to the PNC. The changing landscape will be a challenge for them to come to terms with, and accommodate within their decades-old certainties.
The party’s perceptions are clouded, it is true, by its adherence to a ‘communist’ party constitution, which at the leadership level has generated its own frictions. As was pointed out in a report in our Wednesday edition, Clement Rohee is the General Secretary of the PPP, which in communist parties is the title of the leader. Cheddi Jagan, for instance, was the General Secretary until his death in 1997. It is not Mr Rohee, however, who is leading the PPP/C in Parliament; it is Mr Jagdeo, to whom Mr Rohee will have to play second fiddle. The Wednesday story adverted, for example, to Mr Jagdeo recently overruling Mr Rohee on the matter of ministerial salaries.
The Opposition Leader’s penchant for autocracy is no secret, so it will not be a source of any particular surprise to discover that this particular personality trait has undergone no change during his stint out of the presidency, or that it is now a source of friction at the party level. In addition, the Wednesday report said, many disagreements at both the Central Committee and the Executive Committee boiled down to what founder of the PPP Cheddi Jagan would have wanted in a given instance. It went on to quote one source as saying that a top executive was annoyed by the frequent comparisons and retorted “Dead men can’t speak.”
Mr Ramotar, who was not chosen to lead the opposition in Parliament, and who when president surrendered his general secretaryship to Mr Rohee, is now out of the National Assembly and has no official party post. He has openly criticized Mr Jagdeo’s statements on negotiations with Venezuela, and was quoted by this newspaper last week as saying: “I wouldn’t say that all is well within the party in the sense that everything is hunky dory, because there is still a lot of soul searching to do and still a lot of work to do to reorganize – still a lot of things that need to be done in the party itself.”
Exactly how long it will take for the party to reorganize is impossible to say. Nothing much is likely to happen presumably, if Mr Jagdeo goes unchallenged, since his style, his analyses and his decisions will then prevail.
