Coalition politics and opportunism

The present contretemps between the PNC and the AFC over the fate of their Cummingsburg Accord in general, and who gets to choose their Prime Ministerial candidate, in particular, is the seen as the “politricks de jour”, temporarily shoving aside discussions on how precisely the PNC would rig the next elections.
But behind these proximate causes lie deeper structural reasons for the dissonance in decision-making in the coalitions – within APNU and in the APNU/AFC combine. These emanate from the nature of the coalitions these parties formed; their relative sizes; and their refusal to openly accept their ethnic bases. The permutations and combinations of possible coalitions are almost infinite; but, in general, they form a continuum if we group them according to: (a) How and why they were formed (b) Whether they were intended to be permanent or not, and (c) Whether the component parties remain separate or combined in structure.
Coalitions are fundamentally coalitions of various interests represented by the member parties, but these may or may not be made explicit. From this perspective, political scientists propose three main types of coalitions: the “alliance”; the “coalition of commitment”; and the “coalition of convenience”. The “alliance” seeks to address one or more major cleavages in the political realm by the fusion of two or more representative parties. Typically, they aim to be permanent, and in tune with this aspiration, field a common slate, and promote a common programme under a common leadership. APNU is actually an “alliance” nominally involving four parties and the PNC, but for all intents and purposes, the primary coalescence is between the PNC, the WPA and GAP.
But in terms of representation of interests in a polity split for half a century along ethnic lines, only African-Guyanese and Indigenous Peoples’ interests were credibly represented. Long regarded as antagonistic to each other, after the 1992 elections, the remnants of the once “multi-ethnic” WPA gradually began to make common cause with the always African-dominated PNC, as they claimed the PPP/C had not addressed the “marginalisation” of the African-Guyanese community. They adjudged the African-Guyanese component of the PPP/Civic to be “tokenistic”. GAP openly represented Indigenous peoples as does the fledgling LJP.
The “coalition of convenience”, however, is driven by one consideration – to form a government that would keep out other parties from government, paradigmatically as with the UF and the PNC in 1964. Programmatically, they had nothing in common and such coalitions are very unstable, and few survive for several reasons. Firstly, their focus is totally electoral – adding up seats – while ignoring the cleavages and forces that made them form separate parties and run on separate platforms in the first place. These differences inevitably surface, when policies and programmes are formulated and implemented. Thirdly, since the capture of power was their prime motivator, they constantly manoeuvre to monopolise the same. We saw the dénouement of this tendency when the PNC made the UF impotent between 1964-1968.
In all coalitions, “disproportion of size” plays out. The larger party sees itself as the senior member, to which the smaller should defer; while the latter considers itself as an equal, due to its strategic position in “tipping the balance”.
Finally, the “coalition of commitment” can be seen as falling between the other two other models, and attempts to bridge the differences in interests between two parties by crafting a platform that spells out areas of compromise. The Cummingsburg Accord purported to be an attempt by APNU and AFC to form such a coalition, but the AFC never explicitly spelt out they were representing Indian-Guyanese interests to constitute a “national multi-ethnic coalition” with APNU, as they boasted. Two years ago, in leaked emails, several AFC personnel identified and bemoaned PNC’s Granger’s unilateralism as fatally affecting those Indian interests. But Ramjattan and Nagamootoo remained mum.
It was obvious since then the AFC was caught in its own artifice: APNU saw the coalition as one of “convenience” and exploited its disproportion of size. We are now witnessing the denouement of the rampant opportunism.