When Desmond Hoyte lost the 1992 general elections, he summoned his distraught supporters to a rally in the south of Georgetown. There he told them not to despair; that the PPPC would soon discover how difficult it would be to govern.
Those distraught supporters sure had a long wait. The PPPC may have made that discovery, but they ruled for an unbroken 23 years afterwards.
When a party loses an election, it tries to placate and comfort its supporters by telling them that all is not lost; that their fortunes will change and change soon.
The PNCR is once again singing a familiar melody. Still smarting from its cut-tail at the 2018 local government elections, it is now telling its supporters to be ready to take back, legally, but before 2020, the constituency seats it lost to the PPPC.
The PNCR should be holding an inquisition as to why it performed so poorly in this month’s local government elections, rather than trying to offer unrealizable promises to its membership.
The PNCR is a lost cause. It could not between 2016 and 2018 narrow the gap in the popular vote between itself and the PPPC. The PPPC, in fact, almost doubled that gap in 2018.
There was a low turnout and that turnout will almost double in 2020. But it is hard to see how the PNCR will be able to do two years onwards, what it could not do over the past two years.
And all the PNCR can offer its supporters are false expectations, rather than holding its campaign team’s feet to the fire. Do the supporters of the PNCR really believe that those seats lost to the Opposition are somehow going to be regained before the next local government elections?
Those supporters should have been questioning what went wrong, and who should be held accountable for the PNCR’s performance on November 12, 2018.
The performance of the PNCR at the November 12th local government elections was calamitous. The results of those elections have already been analyzed.
It is no use asking supporters to go and see the margins by which they lost. The PNCR lost in areas where they should not have lost, and the turnout in their strongholds was woeful, especially considering that they needed to steal the popular vote from the PPPC.
They did not, and the party leadership and campaign team must be asked to answer for this performance. If this is the same leadership and campaign team that will pilot the PNCR into the 2020 elections, then they can again expect a sound thrashing.
The future of the PNCR looks bleak.
The present crop of PNCR leaders cannot turn things around. They lack the political experience and the grassroots appeal to avoid the inevitable.
In the meantime, the party faithful will be fed a great deal of diversions and distractions to take their minds off mission impossible: retaining its incumbency in 2020.
If you read carefully between the lines of what the supporters are being told, you will realize that they are being fed excuses about divisions contributing to the party’s loss and threatening the party’s ability to retain power in 2020.
The writing is on the wall for the PNCR. It will not be able to reverse its present fortunes. Time is not on its side and not even oil will save it from the ignominious and inglorious defeat, which awaits it and its coalition partners in free and fair elections in 2020
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