Consequential Electoral Contestation in the Caribbean

Consequential Electoral Contestation in the Caribbean

Prof. Ivelaw Lloyd Griffith, PhD

(28 July 2025) —When political sociologists concerned with the Caribbean reflect on the period March through December 2025 years from now, they will likely proclaim it as having been one of the most consequential electoral seasons in the region. Why, one may ask? Well, here’s why!

The Regional Electoral Landscape

On March 12, the incumbent People’s United Party (PUP) in Belize was returned to power, with Prime Minister Johnny Briceño serving his second term in office. Later that same month, on the 21st, the Movement for the Future of Curaçao (MFK) won an absolute majority, securing 13 of the 21 parliamentary seats, a first-time-ever feat. The following month—on April 28, to be exact—the power play in Trinidad and Tobago delivered a stunning outcome. To its dismay, the ruling People’s National Movement (PNM), which has been the dominant political force in the twin-island republic for 55 years, although not continuously, was soundly trounced by the United National Congress (UNC). The UNC swept the polls, winning 26 of the 41 parliamentary slots, and returning Mrs. Kamala Persad-Bissessar to power after a decade in the political wilderness as Leader of the Opposition.

Suriname, the Caribbean’s sole Dutch-speaking republic, provided the next bit of evidence of consequential electoral jockeying. Following the general elections on May 25th and the presidential voting in the unicameral National Assembly on July 6, the nation with the dubious distinction of being the only one in the world to have had a leader who was convicted for drug trafficking, albeit in absentia, elected Mrs. Jennifer Geerlings-Simons as the country’s first female leader, altering the gender dynamics of the region’s leadership. For the first time the region has three head-women-in-charge at the same time. The new president, a physician, joins Prime Ministers Mia Amor Mottley in Barbados and Kamala Persad-Bissessar in Trinidad and Tobago, both of whom are attorneys. Noteworthy, too, is another trio of constitutionally important female leaders: Christine Kangaloo is the President of Trinidad and Tobago, Sandra Mason is the President of Barbados, and Marcella Liburd is the Governor-General of St. Kitts and Nevis. They are all lawyers.

But the region anticipates more consequential elections, though. The head of the transitional council in Haiti has announced that the first round of presidential elections would be held on November 15, this year with a second round held in early January 2026. The region and the rest of the world concerned are anxious about these prospects given the political and security quagmire in which the nation finds itself. In Jamaica, the political forces are positioning themselves for elections, which must be held by December. Prime Minister Andrew Holness, who was last elected in September 2020, most definitely will be seeking a third term in office, with hopes that his party, the Jamaica Labor Party (JLP), will ride the wave of the dramatic turnaround in the country’s crime profile and its increased tourism performance and secure most of the 63 parliamentary positions. Elections are also on the cards for St. Vincent and the Grenadines, where the 78-year-old former UWI political science lecturer Dr. Ralph Gonsalves is eyeing a record sixth term for the Unity Labour Party (ULP). Although no date for the polls has yet been announced, Gonsalves recently hinted that the legislature soon will be dissolved. With the last elections having been held in November 2020, it is reasonable to speculate that elections will be called for this October or November.

However, all eyes—in the Caribbean and beyond—are trained on Guyana, where—indisputably—the region’s most consequential elections will be held. The date is set for September 1, and six political parties have been approved by GECOM—the Guyana Elections Commission: A Partnership for National Unity (APNU), Alliance for Change (AFC), Assembly of Liberty and Prosperity (ALP), Forward Guyana Movement (FGM), People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C), the incumbents, and We Invest in Nationhood (WIN). While all six parties will participate in the general elections, only four – APNU, AFC, PPP/C, and WIN – submitted complete lists to compete in all ten electoral districts for the regional elections. The ALP will compete in districts 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 10, and the FGM will do so in districts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 10.

Nonetheless, before suggesting why Guyana’s elections are consequential, it is important to describe briefly the country’s governance landscape, which is different than arrangements elsewhere in the Commonwealth Caribbean in significant ways.

The System and the Stakes in Guyana

Guyana has a hybrid parliamentary system of governance. The executive is headed by the president, who is also Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces and is limited to two consecutive terms. The legislature is a sixty-five-member unicameral National Assembly. As regards the judiciary, it comprises a High Court, led by a Chief Justice, and a Court of Appeal, headed by a Chancellor of the Judiciary, with final appellate jurisdiction lying with the Trinidad-based Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ). Guyana acceded to the CCJ’s appellate jurisdiction in 2005.

Political parties that contend for power name their presidential candidates on their legislative lists, and the party with the single largest legislative group gets the presidency. The Constitution and the Representation of the People Act provide for the election of members of the National Assembly under a system of Proportional Representation. The system caters for geographical and gender representation, where the quota for geographical representation is established by dividing the number of valid votes cast in a particular constituency by the number of seats assigned to that constituency. The National Top-Up seats are established by dividing the total number of votes cast in the country by the total number of seats in the National Assembly. Seats are first assigned to lists of candidates that secured sufficient votes to fulfill the quota after which the ‘largest remainder’ formula is applied to assign the rest of the seats, both at the constituency level and at the national level. Also, the system accommodates both general and regional elections at the same poll

Twenty-five members of the National Assembly are elected from the ten Geographic Constituencies, which coincide with the country’s ten administrative regions, and forty members are elected from National Top-Up Lists. Political parties must compete in at least at least six of the ten regions and nominate candidates for thirteen of the twenty-five regional seats. Moreover, at least one-third of the candidates must be women. Guyana’s 2020 general elections have the doubtful distinction of being the most prolonged contestation for power ever, not just in Guyana, but in the entire Caribbean. As the report by the Carter Center on the elections noted, “An election that should have been held within 90 days of the no confidence vote ultimately took place after fifteen months. Results that should have been finalized within a few days took five months.” Nine political parties vied for power, and the opposition PPP/C won thirty-three of the sixty-five seats. Thus, its presidential candidate, Dr Mohamed Irfaan Ali, then forty years old, was subsequently sworn in as president on August 2, 2020.

Guyana’s Black Gold

But why are the 2025 elections consequential? The answer has to do significantly with the country’s oil bounty. As I explained in Oil and Climate Change in Guyana’s Wet Neighborhood, which was published last month by Ian Randle Publishers (IRP) of Jamaica and is available at IRP, Amazon, and Book Fusion (eBook), the Caribbean’s English-speaking outpost in South America hit a Black Gold motherload with the discovery of 11 billion barrels of oil and 16 trillion cubic feet of gas offshore in May 2015. Oil production began four years later, in December 2019. Considerable oil revenue is being earned, even though the Production Sharing Agreement signed between the government and the oil companies in 2016 is lopsided, favoring the companies. Guyana has a sovereign wealth fund, but some of the oil bounty is being disbursed in the form of salary increases, cash grants of G$100,000 (about US$479) to citizens and for every newborn child, free university education, tax rollbacks, removal of bridge tolls, construction of new hospitals, schools, bridges, and roads, among many other things.

With oil production now hovering around 650,000 barrels per day and projected to rise to 1.7 million barrels per day by 2030, Guyana’s geopolitical and geoeconomic importance extends beyond the Caribbean, partly because some of the world’s political heavyweights have stakes there. For instance, while the American-owned oil giant ExxonMobil dominates the headlines in relation to the prolific Stabroek Block, the massive operation there is undertaken by a consortium, involving another American firm, Chevron, which recently acquired the Hess Corporation’s stake for US$53 billion, and a Chinese company, China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC). Moreover, the invitation extended in 2023 for Guyana to join the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which it declined, is a huge indicator of the high esteem in which The Land of Many Waters is held as a major player-in-the-making. In the CARICOM context, Guyana, which hosts the regional secretariat, is playing leading roles in relation to food security and biodiversity, among other areas.

So, the stakes in Guyana are high, and the forthcoming elections are consequential. In all this, candidates in Guyana and elsewhere in the Caribbean would do well to remember the words of wisdom uttered by a respected former Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi: “the winning or losing of the election is less important than strengthening the country,” not the least because Guyana needs considerable strengthening in relation to dealings with the oil conglomerates and coping with Nicolás Maduro’s shenanigans in Venezuela. Guyana’s leaders post the elections also must contend with the potential climate change peril, especially since the country’s capital, Georgetown, is projected to be one of several cities worldwide that could be fully or partially submerged by 2030 because of rising sea levels.

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Professor Ivelaw Lloyd Griffith, Founding Fellow of the Caribbean Policy Consortium, has published widely on Caribbean affairs. His recent books are Oil and Climate Change in the Guyana-Suriname Petro Power Basin (2024), Challenged Sovereignty (2024), Sylvie’s Love and Loss (2024), and Oil and Climate Change in Guyana’s Wet Neighborhood (2025). He has held leadership positions in the Caribbean and the United States, including as Vice Chancellor of the University of Guyana, President of Fort Valley State University, provost of universities in Virginia and New York, and as a Dean at Florida International University. His writings are accessible at www.jefftheleo.com, and he can be reached at ivelawlloyd@gmail.com.