AFC appoints David Patterson interim leader amid leadership talks

Days after Nigel Hughes resigned as Leader of the Alliance For Change (AFC) with immediate effect, party executives have selected Chairman David Patterson to act as interim leader as they continue to reel from their poor performance at the recently held 2025 elections. Hughes’ resignation came just over one year after taking up the role and less than a month after the AFC’s poor performance in the September 1 General and Regional Elections. The party was kicked out of the Parliamentary opposition after failing to garner sufficient votes to return to the National Assembly. But according to the AFC in a statement on Saturday, its “…electoral performance rests collectively on the entire executive, and not on Mr Hughes alone”.

During an emergency meeting on Friday, the AFC’s National Executive Committee (NEC) directed that a delegation of its members met with Hughes to appeal to him to continue serving as leader until a National Conference is convened to elect new leadership. In the interim, the Party said its Chairman, David Patterson, will fulfil the duties as leader. This is the second time Hughes has resigned from a leadership position within the AFC. He had previously served as Chairman of the AFC but resigned back in April 2016 over “internal difficulties on a point of principle”.

Since his return to the helm of the party after being elected as leader in June of 2024, Hughes began his “Better Must Come”-coined campaign into the 2025 General and Regional Elections, during which the party churned out a dismal performance and was booted from the National Assembly.
In a brief telephone interview with this publication earlier this month, Hughes had indicated that the AFC would be meeting shortly with all its members to conduct a thorough analysis of the 2025 polls. “I do have an analysis, but I’d rather share it with the party first before I share it with the public. The party is going to meet shortly, and it will decide what rebuilding is needed. First of all, we have to do an analysis of the results, and based on that analysis, we will then determine what direction to take,” Hughes had stated. The AFC said in a statement on Saturday that it has already begun a comprehensive SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) assessment of its performance in the 2025 elections, with particular emphasis on identifying what is required for the party to regain its standing.
The AFC contested the September 1 polls independently after the collapse of negotiations with its former coalition partner, the People’s National Congress (PNC)-led A Partnership for National Unity (APNU). The APNU and AFC had coalesced to contest the 2015 elections, which they won but failed to secure a second term at the 2020 polls.
The collapse of the coalition talks was further compounded with several top AFC members jumping ship and joining the AFC. In fact, Juretha Fernandes, who along with Sherod Duncan and Ricky Ramsaroop, as well as other prominent members that had cut ties with the AFC to sign onto APNU’s list of candidates, contested the recent elections as the Prime Ministerial Candidate alongside APNU’s leader, Aubrey Norton. At the September 1 polls, however, not only was the Hughes-led AFC kicked out of the benches of the Parliamentary opposition, but the Norton-led APNU was also ousted as the main Parliamentary opposition party.
The vote count at the 2025 General and Regional Elections showed that the AFC struggled to secure enough votes to earn a single seat in the National Assembly. The party, which went to the polls with Hughes and Indigenous rights advocate Laura George on its ticket, only managed to secure 1765 votes in the General Elections and 1833 in the Regional Elections.
Both the AFC’s and APNU’s Parliamentary influences were weakened at the hands of the We Invest in Nationhood (WIN) – a new party headed by United States (US)-sanctioned businessman Azruddin Mohamed, which managed to grab votes from many of the former coalition partners’ traditional support bases to become the main Parliamentary opposition. Once an emerging third force in Guyana, the AFC had won five out of 65 seats in Parliament at the 2006 elections and seven in 2011. It teamed up with the APNU in 2015, and together they won that year’s elections, but their term was cut short in 2018 when the Government fell to a no-confidence motion. By 2020, AFC’s popularity had declined, with many accusing the party of being submissive to the PNC-led APNU during the coalition’s tenure in office. Following their loss at the 2020 polls, the APNU and AFC, together, held 31 seats in the National Assembly, thus forming the main Parliamentary opposition. Of these, the AFC itself had occupied nine of those seats, while the remaining 22 were held by APNU politicians. At the September 1 polls, the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) recorded a landslide victory with some 133,432 votes, which earned the party 36 seats in the National Assembly. In the 65-seat House, WIN gained 16 seats, APNU 12 seats, and the Amanza Walton-Desir-led Forward Guyana Movement (FGM) copped one seat.