The PPP’s boast has always been that it never lost elections. While it gained the highest votes in 1964, it was the PNC that was invited to form the government, which it did in coalition with the United Force. The slogan of ‘cheated not defeated’ resounded through the decades. The slogan is once again rearing its head. The claim that it lost as a result of fraud allows it to maintain the delusion, for the benefit of its supporters, that it has never lost elections.
This also serves to protect its leaders and policies from critical analysis and corrective action and revive its historic claims to victimology, now of an openly posturing ethnic political entity, to sustain the sympathy of its innocent supporters against the tribal hordes.
The fall of the PPP, though a shock to its leaders and members, which will take some time for them to come to terms with, was a gradual process and commenced in 1997 with the passing of Cheddi Jagan. He was the only person within the PPP who kept alive the flame of national unity by way of a coalition, despite the triumphalism in 1992 and a deeply hostile PNC. When he passed in 1997, those forces in the PPP that opposed national unity by
