Continuity, Change, Dollars, and Disenchantment in Guyana’s 2025 Elections

Continuity, Change, Dollars, and Disenchantment in Guyana’s 2025 Elections

Professor Ivelaw Lloyd Griffith

(01 October 2025) —Today—October 1, 2025—marks one month since the lone English-speaking republic in South America held its national and regional elections. In my pre-elections analysis in an earlier TWP, I explained that the then-highly-anticipated elections were destined to be consequential. But, as is shown below, the contestation for power was not only consequential, it was also historic. However, before addressing the curiosity about these aspects, it is useful to offer a reminder of the country’s electoral system.

 

The System and the Earlier Contestation

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. Also, the system caters for 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 33 of the 65 seats. Thus, its presidential candidate, Dr Mohamed Irfaan Ali, was later sworn in as president on August 2, 2020.

The 2025 Contestation

GECOM—the Guyana Elections Commission—approved the following six parties for the September polls: A Partnership for National Unity (APNU), Alliance for Change (AFC), Assembly of Liberty and Prosperity (ALP), Forward Guyana Movement (FGM), the incumbent People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C), and We Invest in Nationhood (WIN). While all six parties participated in the general elections, only four – APNU, AFC, PPP/C, and WIN – submitted complete lists for all ten electoral districts for the regional elections.

According to GECOM, of the 718,715 individuals registered to vote, 438,467 exercised their franchise. As the Table below shows, the incumbent PPP/C won 242,498 votes, 55.31 percent of the total; WIN secured 109,066 votes, 24.87 percent of the total; APNU garnered 77,998 votes, 17.79 percent of the total; FGM captured 4,326 votes, 0.99 percent of the total; the AFC won 3,610 votes, 0.82 percent, and ALP gained just under a thousand votes, 969, to be exact, representing 0.22 percent of the total votes cast. These results influenced the following distribution of the 65 parliamentary seats as the graphic below shows: 36 to the PPP/C, representing a gain of three over the last parliamentary gains; 16 to the WIN; 12 to the APNU; and 1 to the FGM.

Table 1: Guyana’s 2025 National Election Results

 

Figure 1: Guyana 2025 Elections Parliamentary Seat Distribution

Continuity and Change

The elections results reflect both continuity and change, the former witnessing the return to power of the 45-year-old Dr. Mohamed Irfaan Ali and the PPP/C. The change is both historic and wide-ranging. For one, not only did the just-three-month-old WIN, led by 38-year-old billionaire and philanthropist Azruddin Mohamed, exceed the expectations of many pundits, but it has supplanted the APNU as the main opposition party. Consequently—and this, too, is historic—for the first time ever—the country’s two top political big-wigs in race-sensitive Guyana are of Indian descent and are both Muslims; Ali is President, and Mohamed is Leader of the Opposition.

Moreover, the political winds of change have been such that the 70-year-old PNCR, the main pillar of the APNU, suffered massive losses; not only did they not win any of the ten voting districts, but they were trounced even in Regions 4 and 10, traditional strongholds. Notable, too, is the fact that the once-influential AFC, which could not reconcile its differences with the PNCR to stay in the coalition that won victory in 2015, was bested by the FMG, which was formed in July 2025 and is led by the 45-year-old former APNU parliamentarian and Shadow Foreign Minister Amanza Walton-Desir. Quite significantly, too, racial voting, one of the long-standing cardinal features of Guyanese politics, seems to have attenuated. This is a hopeful sign of the racial bridges that can be built, although it is too early to tell whether this marks the dawn of a “new politics” or is simply a political aberration.

Dollars and Disenchantment

As has become the norm with elections in most places, Guyana’s electoral contestation was witnessed by several observers, including from the local Private Sector Commission, the Organization of American States, CARICOM, the Carter Center, the European Union (EU), and the Commonwealth Secretariat. The electorate—and citizens in general—demonstrated commendable maturity in eschewing violence, both in the run-up to the election, on polling day, and afterwards. This was a dramatic and much-appreciated departure from the realities of the 2020 elections. Moreover, although there were claims of fraud in some electoral districts, voting by Venezuelans and by Commonwealth citizens from Bangladesh and Nigeria, and a vote recount was necessary in a few cases, GECOM earned plaudits for the fairly high degree of efficiency in the management of the elections.

The nature of the results begs the following question: what explains these dramatic and historic outcomes? Understandably, the outcomes matrix has several elements, only two of which are addressed here. They are both D words; one is dollars, and the other is disenchantment. Dollars were demonstrably at play from two main sources: from the political patronage of the incumbent PPP/C, and from the wealthy business titan Azruddin Mohamed whose philanthropy and unassuming personality became political magnets. In relation to the ruling party and the leveraging of the oil bounty, full use was made of its incumbency advantage. This was evident in the salary increases for government workers, cash grants for citizens and every newborn child, free university education, tax rollbacks, and the removal of bridge tolls.

Moreover, thousands of police and army officers were promoted, and much was made of the construction of new hospitals, schools, bridges, and roads, among other infrastructure projects. The largesse and political patronage also partly explained the larger than usual number of political operatives that “jumped ship,” moving from the APNU to the PPP/C, although AFC leaders did move to the APNU. Indeed, in presenting their initial elections report, the EU observers felt compelled to note that “The campaign finance is largely unregulated leading to a lack of transparency and accountability. The ruling party benefited from the advantages of incumbency. Public projects such as hospitals, schools, roads and bridges were inaugurated in parallel with campaign activities, while state media, government and social media channels amplified the ruling party’s messages. … when the line between state and party blurs voters are disadvantaged and the level of playing field is compromised.”

Perhaps the most dramatic evidence of the disenchantment factor is reflected in the trouncing that the APNU suffered, losing even in traditional PNCR strongholds, as noted above. The PNCR in particular had been experiencing leadership discontent and disagreements with the AFC over merger modalities, all of which led to defections by leaders and influencers, weak campaign fund-raising, and gravitation to the PPP/C and the maverick newcomer WIN on elections day. The disenchantment also appears to have resulted in large numbers of APNU supporters preferring not to vote at all rather than cast their votes for another party.

Beyond the Elections

With the elections behind them, Guyanese are now looking ahead. This calls to mind the wisdom of a respected leader from the Global South: India’s Indira Gandhi, who once remarked: “the winning or losing of the election is less important than strengthening the country.” President Ali and the new parliament have many strengthening challenges and opportunities ahead of them.

In relation to the Black Gold being extracted from the Guyana Basin at the rate of 650,000 barrels per day, for instance, the impending expiration of the 2016 Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) places a high premium on securing a successor PSA that offers a better deal for The Land of Many Waters. Also, the new leadership would do well to revisit and strengthen the oil spill legislation that was passed hastily this past May. In other areas, as I show in my book Oil and Climate Change in Guyana’s Wet Neighborhood, climate change presents some existential threats to the low-lying Atlantic coast that require urgent attention. Additionally, Maduro’s roguery in relation to the Essequibo will require astute geopolitical management.

© Prof. Ivelaw Lloyd Griffith/The Ward Post

[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). A former Vice Chancellor of the University of Guyana, President of Fort Valley State University, and provost of universities in Virginia and New York, he also served as a Dean at Florida International University. His writings are accessible at www.jefftheleo.com, and he can be reached at ivelawlloyd@gmail.com. ]