Bolivia and Guyana: Oh the stupidity of humans!
Kaieteur News – The PPP came back stunned in the March 2020 election. Seven months after this achievement in Guyana, it was repeated in Bolivia. The Towards Socialism Movement lost power when the army, in October 2019, pressed President Evo Morales to resign.
An interim government was set, whose leader of Parliament for a year later decided to contest the October 2020 election along with several right-wing parties. They lost. Why? Because for the year in which they administered Bolivia, they refused to learn the lessons that hundreds of years have given to the people of the 21st century.
When you are in power, when you criticize the leaders you removed, you have to rule in another way. You have to distance yourself from the raggedness, corruption, abuse of the poorer classes, arrogance, incompetent control, etc., of the previous administration. If you do not, the electorate will come to hate you and would want to move you.
Before we discuss Guyana, I continue to refer to the election of Greece’s left-wing party, Syriza. It came into effect in 2015 during severe austerity measures enforced by the European Central Bank as a debt relief requirement. His rejection of the harsh statements made him very popular with the people of Greece who voted him into power.
Then Syriza’s Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras did one of the most idiotic things any politician of any age could have done. The very hardships he denied when he was in opposition, he accepted and acted in even more serious ways. Tsipras had to be the biggest fool in the world to think he would be re-elected. The obvious picture of him in front of the voter’s eyes was the picture of a fraudster. If you promise citizens to reduce working hours and when you come to power and you didn’t, they may forget the promise. But they will hate you by doing the opposite, that is, extending the working hours.
So we have Greece, Guyana, Bolivia and there will be hundreds more like them in future competitive elections, and the reason is that people are refusing to learn from the graphic mistakes living in history. In Guyana, the March 2020 election drama will not disappear because the Guyanese people have internalized a strong historical lesson.
In the 21st century, with the ubiquity of social media, the faults and sins of every government will be intensively discussed; no country is excluded. Here’s what happened to the APNU + AFC, 2015-2019. His broken promises, corruption, power drunkenness, anti-working-class insensitivity, mediocre performance, distant leadership and the instability of his presidential spending enraged voters who were expecting so much after 23 years of PPP dominance.
What Guyana, Bolivia and Greece have in common is that their former ruling parties face a miserable future. The Movement to Socialism is unlikely to be defeated by an unconnected conservative movement. Syriza’s success was born in unique circumstances that will not be repeated in the distant future of Greece.
In Guyana, the worst case scenario is present. The death of the AFC is a scientific fact; even though they say they will never apply science to human behavior. What could happen is that one of the smaller parties may slowly develop to attract the kind of voters who fell to the AFC between 2002 and 2014. But that’s far down the future.
The PNC is going to remain a weak party. She recovered from the Corbin years because people saw the new leadership along with her alliance with the WPA as the birth of a different PNC. The PNC’s self-destruction from March to the present makes it difficult to regain its historical strength.
It is impossible for the PNC to gain power in the coming decades. First, he never has numbers to win an election. Second, no smaller party is going to touch the PNC even with a 10-foot pole. It can be said with certainty that the future of the PNC is uncertain.
The vacuum is worrying because no matter how electorally popular the PPP stays, no matter how generous the PPP is with oil revenues, no matter how deep the lessons, the PPP would have learned from with its 23 years in power, transparency, accountability, good governance and democracy will always be kept even in diluted forms once a country has vigorous, vibrant and competent opposition. I guess it would be better to say that a party named the AFC and an entity called the ANPU is a moment that will never come again.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of this newspaper.)