A Partnership Unmade: Why APNU and AFC Could Not Coalesce for September 1

 

Essay · Governance and Transparency

The failure of APNU and AFC to unite for the 2025 elections stemmed from structural issues, not just personalities, leading to a decisive loss and the rise of a new political force.

By Terrence Richard Blackman, Ph.D. · April 28, 2026

It is now more than seven months since the PPP/C’s resounding return to office on September 1, 2025, and the question that lingers — among serious people who care about Guyana’s democratic architecture — is not why the opposition lost. The opposition was going to struggle against an incumbent flush with oil revenues and record GDP growth. The harder, more instructive question is why A Partnership for National Unity and the Alliance For Change could not bring themselves to the altar a third time. Why the Cummingsburg Accord of 2015 could not be rewritten for 2025. Why two parties that had, between them, the only recent experience of dislodging the PPP from office chose to walk into the election separately — and, separately, lost.

Begin with the arithmetic.

Begin with the arithmetic. In 2015, APNU and AFC won together, narrowly, because together their combined bases crossed a threshold that neither could cross alone. That was the Schelling insight embedded in the Cummingsburg Accord: the focal point around which otherwise divergent constituencies — urban and rural, Indo-Guyanese and Afro-Guyanese, Georgetown professionals and Essequibo farmers — could coordinate. It was, to borrow from game theory, a cooperative equilibrium sustained by the credible threat that any defection would return the country to the PPP. That arithmetic has not changed. If anything, the entrance of new political actors has raised the threshold. In Guyana’s current electoral structure, fragmentation is not a risk — it is a guarantee of defeat.

In 2020, that equilibrium was broken

In 2020, that equilibrium was broken — not at the ballot box but in the five months of recount dispute that followed, which substantially altered the coalition’s political standing in the eyes of much of the electorate. The coalition lost the election. More important, it lost the benefit of the doubt. By the time the partnership formally dissolved at the end of 2022, as former AFC Leader Khemraj Ramjattan announced, the question was no longer whether APNU and AFC could govern together. It was whether either could be trusted to share power at all.

The public, understandably, has reduced the 2025 negotiations to a narrative of greed. That is not wrong. It is incomplete.

The public, understandably, has reduced the 2025 negotiations to a narrative of greed. That is not wrong. It is incomplete.

The two parties agreed in January 2025 to explore rekindling the 2015–2020 coalition, with talks meant to conclude by the end of March. The 31 March deadline passed without agreement. Some weeks later, the talks collapsed publicly: the AFC announced it would contest the general elections on its own; APNU stated it remained willing to re-engage.

Two sticking points, both structural, both revealing.

First, the presidential candidate. APNU held firm that the coalition’s presidential nominee should be PNC leader Aubrey Norton, since the PNC is the largest opposition party and the largest party within APNU. The AFC, led by Nigel Hughes, declined. The AFC’s public position evolved over the negotiation: initially it wanted Hughes himself; later it accepted that it would not demand the presidency; finally it proposed a consensus candidate. Hughes acknowledged that the AFC’s opposition to Norton was a major factor in the breakdown, and that the party had proposed former Foreign Affairs Minister and Guyana’s agent before the ICJ, Carl Greenidge, as a compromise candidate. APNU refused every compromise nominee.

Second, the division of ministerial and parliamentary positions. The AFC put forward a proposal for a 60–40 power-sharing split, with 60 percent of positions held by APNU representatives. APNU would not move from a 70–30 split, with AFC taking the lower share. Ten percentage points. That was the Maginot Line of the negotiation. Neither side moved.

Read together, these are one dispute. They are both about the same underlying question: does the AFC enter a second coalition as a genuine partner, with real institutional leverage over the presidency and cabinet, or does it re-enter the junior status it occupied between 2015 and 2020? The AFC, which had held substantive ministerial posts in the last government but — as its own former coalition colleagues have conceded — had been forced to yield on key principles, was unwilling to sign a contract that reproduced that bargain. APNU, holding the larger vote bank and the institutional memory of the PNC, was unwilling to concede real power to a partner it believed had shrunk.

APNU would not move from a 70–30 split, with AFC taking the lower share. Ten percentage points. That was the Maginot Line of the negotiation. Neither side moved.

This is a classic commitment problem.

This is a classic commitment problem. Neither party could credibly promise the other that, once in office, it would honor a power-sharing arrangement that neither had honored the last time. The 2015–2020 experience was not a reassurance. It was a warning.

The structural reading above accounts for the public shape of the dispute. It does not quite account for its depth.

The structural reading above accounts for the public shape of the dispute. It does not quite account for its depth. To understand why a negotiation that should, on paper, have produced a deal did not, one must reckon with at least four dynamics that sat beneath the surface of the press releases. Each is, in isolation, difficult to confirm from the public record. Together, they are the only reading of the collapse that explains both the defection pattern and the eventual electoral result.

The categorical position on the opposition leader.

The categorical position on the opposition leader. Within the AFC, the position against Norton as presidential candidate appears to have been, from the beginning, a floor rather than a bargaining posture. What reached the public as a series of escalating demands — first Hughes himself, then a withdrawal of that demand, then the proposal of a consensus candidate — reads, in retrospect, as successive rephrasings of a single underlying veto. The compromise nominees, Greenidge among them, were serious in the sense that any of them would have been acceptable to the AFC. They were not serious in the sense that the AFC leadership had modeled whether any of them could possibly be acceptable to APNU. A proposal whose acceptance the proposer has not modeled is a veto wearing the clothes of a compromise.

Parallel channels.

Parallel channels. While the two party leaderships negotiated in the formal channel, other actors in the AFC’s orbit were in contact with anti-leadership figures inside the PNC, exploring a realignment that would have sidelined Norton entirely. That parallel track rested on the assumption that PNC defectors would leave their party. When the would-be defectors discovered that resignation would, under Guyana’s closed-list proportional system, cost them their parliamentary seats, the track collapsed. It did not, however, disappear without trace. The negotiation above the table and the negotiation below it were mutually corrosive. Good-faith bargaining is difficult when each side knows the other is also shopping elsewhere.

The internal coalition faction.

The internal coalition faction. Within the AFC itself, there was a real constituency willing to accept the 70–30 split under a Norton presidency. That faction lost the internal battle. Its defeat produced, in June, the departure of three sitting parliamentarians: one accepted elevation to APNU’s Prime Ministerial candidacy, the other two followed, and all three were subsequently expelled. Read as isolated acts of opportunism, the defections are hard to explain. Read as the public surfacing of a faction that had already been defeated inside its own party, they become legible. The AFC’s official negotiating position was, in the first instance, a faction’s victory over its own party; only in the second instance was it the AFC’s position. That distinction matters, because a negotiating position that does not command internal consensus cannot credibly bind a future government.

Personal disqualification.

Personal disqualification. GBJ reporting indicates that certain individuals close to the negotiation had reason to believe they would not be acceptable participants in any coalition government. The basis for that belief was never formally tabled in the talks; its presence shaped them nonetheless. For those individuals, no coalition was preferable to one from which they would be excluded — and they were sufficiently placed to act on that preference. A negotiation that cannot name one of its actual constraints can rarely resolve it.

These four dynamics do not replace the structural reading. They deepen it.

These four dynamics do not replace the structural reading. They deepen it. The commitment problem was not abstract; it was instantiated in specific rooms by specific actors with specific reasons, only some of which were speakable. What the public saw as a dispute over percentages was, underneath, a dispute over whom the coalition would include, whom it would exclude, who inside each party would be strengthened, and who would be relegated. The percentages were the measurable residue of a negotiation whose real substance could not be put on paper.

The election returned a judgment that was, in its way, unambiguous.

The election returned a judgment that was, in its way, unambiguous. The PPP/C won decisively, securing 242,498 votes (55.31%) and 36 seats in the National Assembly, an increase of three seats from the 2020 election ¹. The AFC — which had once been the third force, winning 5 out of 65 seats in Parliament at the 2006 elections and seven in 2011 ² — failed to win a single seat in the National Assembly, taking only 3,610 votes (0.82%) and losing all nine of the seats it had held as part of the 2020 coalition ¹. APNU came third with 77,998 votes (17.79%) and 12 seats, down ten from the combined 31 seats the APNU+AFC coalition held previously ¹. The main parliamentary opposition is now the We Invest Nationhood (WIN) party headed by US-sanctioned businessman Azruddin Mohamed, which captured 109,066 votes (24.87%) and 16 seats ¹. WIN won Regions 7 and 10, the latter being Upper Demerara-Berbice, which had long been recognized as an immovable stronghold for the PNCR ¹.

GBJ Data Note: The PPP/C secured 242,498 votes (55.31%) and 36 seats in the National Assembly, while the AFC failed to win any seats with only 3,610 votes (0.82%).

This is the inescapable fact.

This is the inescapable fact. The space that APNU and AFC could not agree to share was filled, in six months, by a newcomer. The architecture the two legacy parties refused to build was occupied by someone who had not been part of the negotiation. Nature, and electoral politics, abhors a vacuum. In a proportional system with multiple credible entrants, opposition fragmentation does not merely weaken parties — it redistributes their voters to whoever can consolidate fastest.

It would be convenient to end the story here with a verdict on Norton and Hughes, and to assign the blame in whatever proportion one’s priors dictate. I decline the invitation. The structural reading is more illuminating than the personal one.

It would be convenient to end the story here with a verdict on Norton and Hughes, and to assign the blame in whatever proportion one’s priors dictate. I decline the invitation. The structural reading is more illuminating than the personal one.

What the collapse tells us is that the Guyanese opposition no longer has a functioning theory of how to win. Any such theory must begin with a simple constraint: no single opposition party, as currently constituted, can win a national election on its own. Coalition is not one strategy among many. It is the only viable path to power. The Cummingsburg Accord worked, in 2015, because both parties believed the coalition was a vehicle for defeating an incumbent that had overstayed its welcome. The premise of that accord was instrumental: the coalition existed to do something. By 2025, after the 2015–2020 governing record and the 2020 electoral crisis, neither party could articulate — to itself or to the public — what the coalition was for, beyond its own continued relevance. The negotiations broke over percentages because the parties had nothing larger than percentages to negotiate over.

Coalition is not one strategy among many. It is the only viable path to power.

There was, in the weeks after the collapse, a theory of victory circulating inside one of the parties that was never quite articulated in public.

There was, in the weeks after the collapse, a theory of victory circulating inside the opposition parties that was never quite articulated in public. It ran roughly as follows: contest the election separately; deny the PPP/C an outright majority; and then rely on post-election parliamentary maneuvering to engineer a strategic realignment before a fresh round of elections. The plan required two assumptions — that the PPP would win only a plurality, and that post-election cooperation would emerge from the same dynamics that had made pre-election cooperation impossible — both unsupported by any serious reading of the actual politics.

The second unmodeled variable was the entrant.

The second unmodeled variable was the entrant. No version of the opposition’s electoral map, so far as I can reconstruct, assigned meaningful weight to the possibility that a well-resourced political newcomer — carrying both local grievance and international sanctions exposure — would enter the field and, in six weeks, absorb a substantial share of the constituency that both APNU and AFC had assumed would return to them by default. WIN was not a counter-move to the collapse of the coalition talks. It was a structural surprise. A negotiation still bargaining over 70–30 was negotiating over a cake whose size it had misjudged.

One might object that this reading underweights ideology.

One might object that this reading underweights ideology. APNU and AFC are not, after all, identical parties: they differ on the role of the state, on attitudes toward private capital, on the architecture of constitutional reform, on the question of how aggressively the oil contract should be renegotiated. Yet the public record of the 2025 negotiations contains almost no evidence that any of these differences shaped the talks. The parties never reached substance. That is itself the diagnosis. A coalition negotiation that cannot get past the question of who shall be president — which is, in the end, a question of name, not platform — has not yet begun the conversation it claims to be having.

There is a further reading, though, and it is the one I keep returning to. Guyanese opposition politics remains organized around the wrong unit of analysis.

There is a further reading, though, and it is the one I keep returning to. Guyanese opposition politics remains organized around the wrong unit of analysis. The coalition debate is fought as a contest between two political organizations, each defending its institutional real estate. But t

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References

1. ¹ Guyana Elections Commission. (2025). Official Results of the 2025 General and Regional Elections.
2. ² Guyana Elections Commission. (2011). Official Results of the 2006 and 2011 General and Regional Elections.

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