Election of the day: Guyana

September is a busy month, electorally, with a number of pretty interesting elections coming up. The month kicks off in Guyana on Monday, where both a presdient and 65-member National Assembly will be elected.

The politics of Guyana have historically been dominated by two parties, both broadly under the social democratic umbrella. The People’s Progressive Party (PPP/C) currently holds a narrow parliamentary majority of 33/65 seats, and their leader, Irfaan Ali, is running for re-election. The primary opposition party, The People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR) currently holds 31 seats, and is running Aubrey Norton, opposition leader since 2022 and longtime party functionary. Ideology does little to explain the difference in support for these parties as there is very little difference. These are, for all practical purposes, ethnic parties, with PPP/C representing the Indo-Guyanese community, and PNCR representing the Afro-Guyanese community. Because the Indo-Guyanese share of the population is slightly larger than the Afro-Guyanese share, the typical outcome is a very close PPP/C win. Since 1992, that pattern has only two exceptions–a larger (54-43) PPP/C win in 1992, and PNCR+allies narrow upset in 2015.

A curious and somewhat unique feature of Guyanese politics, particularly in a Latin American context, is the complete absence of a remotely viable conservative or center-right party. The closest thing to a conservative party, the relatively centrist A United Front, managed to win just enough seats to play kingmaker in the country’s first post-independence election. They lost half their seats in the next election and never had more than 2 seats in the Assembly after that. Their decline was partly demographic–along with business elites and some Amerindian communities, their primary source of support was the Portuguese community, descendants of indentured servants from Madeira who arrived shortly after the abolition of slavery in the mid-19th century, who largely decamped Georgetown for London/Toronto/NYC/Boston in the 60’s.

While quality public polling does not appear to exist, the general expectation is that Ali will likely win a second term. But there is a wild card–a third party that appears to have both legacy parties concerned. WIN (We Invest in Nationhood) merged with and effectively took over an older minor party and their leader, Azruddin Mohamed, are mounting a serious challenge. Mohamed, the scion of an obscenely wealthy gold trader, appears to be tapping into a cross-ethnic anxiety that existing legacy parties might not be doing all they could to ensure the country’s newfound oil wealth is spent and distributed in a manner that would meaningfully and positively impact their lives. Mohamed is outdoing them in wealth-sharing pledges, including an Alaska-like dividend payment. There have been reports–he denies them–that he’s been handing out cash at his rallies. Certain details about Mohamed might sound vaguely familiar to readers who have the misfortune of following American politics: his business practices are shady (he was sanctioned by the US treasury last year for his involvement in some gold-smuggling schemes and tax evasion), he’s a tacky wealth-flaunter (who seems to prefer a Jay Leno-esque car collection to gold toilets) his politics are seemingly unserious and opaque, his appeal is personalist and charismatic. Both major party candidates have been attacking Mohamed and WIN more than their traditional opponents, each warning that WIN is a spoiler for the other major party.

Guyana is presently transitioning from a low-middle income country with an agricultural economy with a modest amount of resource extraction (bauxite and gold mining, primarily) into a wealthy petrostate. The economy has grown well into double digits annually for the last five years, including 44% in 2024. Georgetown today is a classic boomtown–cranes and construction everywhere, fancy new restaurants appealing to global elite tastes, hotels charging $500 a night for rooms they couldn’t charge a tenth of that much for a decade ago. Oil production will continue to ramp up during the winner of this election’s presidency. Who is in charge will have an outsized influence on how that wealth is (or isn’t) spread around. It wouldn’t surprise me if Mohamed fizzled out and ran a distant third, and it wouldn’t surprise me if we won. But even if he’s a pretty big flop as a presidential candidate, he could still retain significant influence over Guyanese politics through his parliamentary party. Guyana uses closed list PR for all 65 seats (40 from a national list, 25 from various regional lists) with no minimum threshold. It’s trivially easy to see how even 5% support for WIN could put them in a position where either PPP/C or PNCR would need their support to form a majority. (I don’t think there’s any precedent for the governing parliamentary party not being the party of the president, but there doesn’t seem to be any legal reason it couldn’t happen, so presumably he could threaten president Ali or Norton with putting the other party in power in the National Assembly.) What he would want, should he find himself in that position, is far from certain.