APNU cannot unseat the PPP/ C – Jagdeo

TIMES INT'L

… opposition group adamant that citizens need change

President Bharrat Jagdeo is confident that the new opposition coalition, ‘A partnership for National Unity’ (APNU), will not threaten the reign of the People’s Progressive Party/ Civic.

Speaking at a media conference at the Office of the President on July 8, Jagdeo insisted that the numbers did not add up.

“Elections are about mathematics, particularly in a country that has as its electoral system proportional representation,” the president stated. “The PNC/R in the last election got 37.07 per cent of the votes; WPA didn’t contest the last election, but the election they contested with GAP/WPA they got, I think, just 2.35 per cent of the votes. The NFA got 417 votes in 2001 – not even a per cent. Now, let’s add 34 plus two, you get 36 per cent of the electoral vote. They haven’t improved. In fact, if anything, the WPA has become defunct. That is the reality of APNU. “You can dress it up, you can call it whatever you want, that is the reality of this coalition; simple mathematics,” the president told reporters, while pointing to the near 55 per cent of the votes that the PPP/C got in the 2006 elections.

He opined that the coalition may be a ‘tactical issue’, but the players remain the same, pointing to the appointment of the PNCR’s presidential candidate, retired Brigadier David Granger, as presidential candidate of APNU. “Granger is running as presidential candidate, so his record doesn’t disappear because he changes the form of the organisation. Granger still has to answer for his record,” Jagdeo noted.

According to the head of state, Granger was known to many as the “chief theoretician and advocate for the doctrine of paramountcy of the party.”

The PNCR criticised Jagdeo and Ramotar for rehashing stories of the past.

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