Third Parties

The Alliance for Change (AFC) appears to be another in a long line of “third forces” in the Guyanese political landscape that is heading the way of the Dodo: extinction. In the British tradition that was inherited (or imposed), Guyanese politics always saw as its model, the two party system in the Westminster tradition. Two parties would display their wares to the public, with the said wares being sufficiently distinct from each other, that the voting public could choose between the two at the ballot box.
Interpreted in Guyana, however, the populace divided themselves before even the wares were shown. Without a hoary past in which the population, drawn from the major continents, could meld into a nation, the several groups in the main remained culturally distinct. With two major ethnic groups vying for political power – the authority to give what to whom – the rules of the model did not distinguish on what basis the numbers to form the government by a majority were agglomerated. Ethnic identification early on became the marker of political mobilisation.
When the modern political system was born exactly in the middle of the 20th century, the newly launched People’s Progressive Party (PPP) attempted to create a broad, nationalist force that included all the groups by whatever criteria they identified – whether by ethnicity/race or class. It was rather tragic that the opportunistic Forbes Burnham, exploited the cleavage of ethnicity, when he broke from the PPP to form the People’s National Congress.
Even though the PPP and even Burnham’s PNC attempted to return the genie of ethnicity into the bottle, progress ebbed and flowed but remained minimal. The two major parties crafted manifestos and programs that were national in scope and made cross ethnic appeals both in words and in the selection of their candidates.
And we arrive at the formation of third parties to challenge the two major parties. The first successful one, was the United Force that made a clear distinction in its pro-capitalist ideology rooted as it was in the Portuguese mercantile community. Based on its ideology it was able to attract pro-capitalist support as well as Amerindians that had been close to the Catholic Church run by the Portuguese community. This party did not make any dent in ethnic mobilisation.
During the 1960’s a spate of parties attempted to challenge the two major parties directly on the ethnic demarcation but were all unsuccessful: there was no ‘logic” in “splitting the vote” if the direct or sub rosa voting rationale was ethnicity. Faced with rigging of the polls between 1968 and 1992, political mobilisation waned as the the struggled for “free and fair elections”. The Working People’s Association (WPA) was formed in this period and individuals from across the ethnic divides rallied to the call of Dr Walter Rodney who they felt coiled challenge the PNC dictatorship more militantly without precipitating a racial civil war.
The return of “free and fair” elections in 1992 returned the country to its now deep-seated ethnic pattern of voting and the WPA and the UF gradually disappeared. The Rise, Organise and Rebuild movement of 2001 was basically a reversion of the older direct ethnic challenge and was more a gesture than an entrenched force. The Alliance for Change (AFC) that first contested the 2006 elections was an attempt to exploit dissatisfaction in the older PPP and PNC by individuals from hose parties that basically saw their leadership paths blocked.
Their comparative success at the 2006 elections (5 seats) and the 2011 one (7seats) illustrate the level of discontent with one or the other older party but they always remained vulnerable to those parties addressing the concerns of their constituents. Alternatively, formed by individuals who were motivated by  personal “leadership” goals, they were always susceptible to the identical denouement that destroyed the original nationalist movement – the PPP of the 1950.
Today, the AFC is evidently on the same path trod by other challenges to the Guyanese political status quo. It would take a Herculean effort to make a credible showing at the next elections.

Extracted from knews