Following the AFC’s decision to contest local government elections on its own, political scientist Henry Jeffrey has accused the party of betraying the agenda of the people who had supported it while commentator Ralph Ramkarran sees it as a sign of the likely demise of the governing coalition by the time 2020 rolls around.
In his Future Notes column in yesterday’s Stabroek News entitled `We all cut from the same cloth’ Jeffrey said that because the Alliance For Change (AFC) had so visibly betrayed the agenda of most of the people who have backed it from the inception, predicting the disaster that will befall it at the November 12 local government elections (LGE) has become something of a national pastime. He said that this is so much so, that few people even believe its explanation of why it is going to those elections independent of its coalition partner.
“In other words, what should have been viewed as normal for a coalition partner is seen as either being the result of compulsion or the kind of political deceit at which the PPP and PNC are masters. The AFC came on the political scene claiming to represent a new political morality but instead has become a textbook case of how quickly political power can corrupt!