People’s Progressive Party/ Civic (PPP/C) presidential candidate Irfaan Ali says he is not fazed by the formation of new parties and their possible impact on his chances at the upcoming general elections.
“I don’t think the small parties will contribute to the splitting of the PPP/C vote,” Ali, who has been criticized for a low public profile, said on Sunday.
The PPP/C presidential candidate did not say if the PPP/C was open to coalescing with any of the smaller parties but said that the members of those parties are welcome to join the PPP/C and work towards his party’s goals.
“The PPP/C has made it very clear that we are open to all Guyanese; to anyone that wants to come on board. What we are open to though, is coming on board to join a programme… of policies and principles and objectives that the PPP would embrace in the next government. Not coming on board to negotiate positions prior to elections and that sort of behaviour we are seeing now,” Ali said.
“We are more interested in policies and crafting measures that will take our country forward and would create opportunities for every Guyanese and that would make sure we create jobs and ensure that we improve the standard of living, that we reduce crime, stimulate our economy and grow our economy. That is what we are focused on. The policies and measures we will announce in our manifesto will speak to every level of development in our country,” he added.
Since the December 21st 2018 No- Confidence Motion which saw the fall of the APNU+AFC government and the naming of March 2nd as General Elections day, a number of smaller parties have signalled their intention to contest. They are A New and United Guyana (ANUG), Liberty and Justice Party (LJP), Federal United Party (Fed-Up), and more recently the Citizenship Initiative (CI) and the soon-to-be-launch-ed Change Guyana Party (CGP). Change Guyana is headed by businessman and Pegasus Hotel proprietor, Robert Badal.
Launched in January of this year against the background that there is the need for a change in the governance system to encompass the main political forces, ANUG was formed. It has since announced that 73-year-old, two-term House Speaker and former PPP executive Ralph Ramkarran will be its presidential candidate for the March 2020 elections. ANUG has promised that it will not coalesce with either of the two main parties to secure a role in government.
January also saw the formation and launch of the FED-UP party, whose leaders Ryan Crawford, Chandra Sohan and Horatio Edmonson said that they would be campaigning for reforms to Guyana’s electoral system to ensure that parliamentary representatives are directly elected by voters, and the creation of a federal system of government.
And while it has bemoaned the governance of both the PPP/C and APNU+AFC, the party has not enunciated a position on if it would join with either of the two.
LJP presidential candidate Lenox Shuman has had discussions with APNU about a possible coalescing but says that no decision has yet been made as he is still to do “a final analysis”.
At the launch of the party last week, Citizen-ship Initiative (CI) founder Ruel Johnson also promis-ed to never coalesce with either APNU+AFC or the PPP/C which he called political “giants”.
And while the PPP/C Presidential Candidate does not believe that the smaller parties will have a negative impact on votes for his party, ANUG’s Henry Jeffrey said that he believes that given the distrust of Guyana’s citizenry at the rule of the larger parties since independence in 1966 coupled with APNU+AFC’s 2015 elections win with less than 5000 votes, smaller parties will play a great role in the upcoming elections.
“Smaller parties read that given the small margin (less than 5,000 votes) that now exists between winning and losing, the smaller parties could garner sufficient votes to prevent either of the large parties from gaining an overall majority and taking both the executive and legislature,” he said.
Worse consequences
“In this context, if they coalesce with one of the larger parties to give it a working parliamentary majority, this will be leaving out one of the larger ethnic groups, much as is happening today with similar if not worse consequences,” he added.
Ali said that the new parties’ impact is not of worry for the PPP as “the party has been attracting more and more support across the country.”
“The PPP is a national party and embraces all the citizens in our country and this is the way the PPP has been working,” he added.
He pointed to Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo’s role in galvanizing support across the country saying that Jagdeo has taken personal responsibility for mobilizing more supporters for the party.
“The General Secretary himself said that over the last four years, one of the most important roles of him as General Secretary in the PPP was to make the PPP more open to all Guyanese so that all Guyanese can feel comfortable embracing the PPP… based on the polices and principles that the PPP would be pursuing in government,” he said.
Ali said that some of the new parties might not make it to E-Day.
“Saying you are launching a party is different from forming a party and getting a party together. It is far too early to say if these parties will contest the elections because there is a lot of things they have to get done; institutional arrangements that have to be done. You also have to gain national support and a national buy-in. It is far too early to judge any of them, but their announcing they will launch a party is different from forming a party,” he said.
“I see a lot of writing on social media about other parties coming. I don’t know if it will materialize or if some of these parties will make it to the elections, given what is required to contest at a national level. The better way we could have judged was if they would have contested the local government elections a year and half ago,” he added.
