Former Finance Minister Winston Jordan on Friday urged PNCR Leader and APNU Presi-dential Candidate Aubrey Norton to step aside, warning him against returning to Parlia-ment or contesting the party’s leadership, while cautioning that APNU’s poor showing at the September 1 elections makes it “hard for the party to come back”.
Speaking in an interview on the KAMSTV “Good Morning Guyana” show, Jordan called on Norton to “be a big man” and accept the election results, to stop the “weeping and wail-ing”, move on to a period of introspection, and “do what is necessary” to bring the party out of the dredges that it has now found itself in.
“My open recommendation is that you should step back. However we look at it, the party has been brought to its lowest, and you were at the helm when the party was brought to its lowest ebb. Ultimately it is the leadership that has to take the responsibility,” Jordan said.
“Don’t go back into Parliament, and don’t contest for leadership in next year’s Congress. You will commit not to run for leadership [of the PNCR]. Let it be early in your introspec-tion over the next few days that you will not be running for leadership next year so that other talent can begin to formalise in the Congress. Step back, become an elder of the party, give advice and so on without overshadowing the new leadership that will be emerging, and we have to do that early. Be part of the moulding and so on and use that to an advantage to support the new leadership, not to overshadow them.”
Norton has been leader of the PNCR since December 2021, when he won the leadership at the party’s Biennial Congress. He was controversially re-elected to the position in 2024, winning unopposed after other competing candidates withdrew due to a myriad of accu-sations of lack of transparency, fairness and accountability in the election process. Since his election, Norton has presided over the party’s decline at the 2023 Local Government Elections and the exodus of a number of the party’s high-ranking executives.
Since Monday’s elections, Norton has been grappling with the PNCR-led APNU’s dismal performance, as official results posted by Returning Officers on GECOM’s website show the coalition not only losing to its long-time rival, the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), but also trailing behind newcomer We Invest in Nationhood (WIN).
Flabbergasted
Flabbergasted, Norton on Friday lobbied GECOM for a “forensic audit of the elections”, calling for the entire 2025 elections to be aborted. The party has already requested and been approved for recounts in Sub-District 4 of Region Four and a partial recount of Re-gion Five. Jordan called on Norton to accept that the jig is up.
“Even with the recount, quite frankly, I don’t think anyone is expecting any particular change to the numbers that were put out there. Move on after this recount; nothing is there, and so move on. Be a big man and move on. Accept and move on; there is nothing to be done,” Jordan noted.
Speaking candidly, Jordan conceded that there was a severely low turnout in many AP-NU/PNCR stronghold areas, with the party particularly hard hit by a lack of support from young voters.
“In the stronghold of the opposition and the main opposition, APNU, there was an even lower turnout based on the figures that have been published so far,” Jordan said, adding that “where I voted I hardly saw any young persons turn out. It was always the people in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s that turned up to vote. The young people were missing in large numbers. So, there are a number of reasons why there was a low turnout. The peo-ple who voted for the APNU were middle- to upper-aged. So, the demographic that you are reaching is ageing and will eventually age out.”
PPP increased vote
According to Jordan, “The PPPC is the only party that seemed to have increased their votes in a situation where voter turnout was considerably less”.
Jordan acknowledged that the APNU votes had not simply evaporated but had actually been absorbed by the WIN party.
“WIN supposedly got 16 seats [in the National Assembly]. Great for a three-month-old party, but when you analyse the 16 seats, where did they come from? When you do the analysis, these seats were predominantly from APNU strongholds and Amerindians,” Jor-dan explained.
The APNU took particularly devastating hits in Regions Four and 10, districts that have his-torically voted for the PNCR.
However, for the 2025 elections, official district declarations made on Wednesday showed the APNU only garnering just 46,956 in the General Elections and 46,772 in the Regional Elections. A fall of almost 70,000 votes when compared against the 116,941 votes that the party got in the General Election in 2020, when it coalesced with the Alliance For Change (AFC). However, the WIN party made inroads on APNU’s support in Region Four, taking 41,607 votes.
The sting has been all the harder for the party to deal with given that the party has also lost its most loyal stronghold of Region 10, where WIN led the district with 10,458 in the General Elections. APNU trailed behind with just 5334, while the PPP took 4260 votes.
Infighting, backbiting
Jordan reasoned that the APNU/PNCR voters were just fed up of the situation, particularly with the major inner turmoil between the APNU and the AFC.
After coalescing to contest the 2015 and 2020 elections, this year the APNU and AFC were in negotiations to enter the 2025 elections as a coalition, but those talks failed.
While the APNU lost major votes in the just-completed General and Regional elections, the AFC barely scraped by, getting negligible votes in most districts.
“One of the reasons people have given is that they were fed up – fed up with the in-fighting, fed up with the backbiting, fed up with the outrageous demands and so on that were being made. And they decided to put a lash on both parties. It is clear that together we win and separately we lose. And that is what happened,” Jordan noted.
Jordan called on Norton to go into the villages of the party’s strongholds and listen to the people about what the “shortcomings” of the party have been. Jordan called on the party to “engage the people year-round, not only at election time.”
No money, no love
He also advised that the PNCR needs to start focusing on a viable financial model that can sustain the party and its support base.
“The big problem with us is that we don’t have the economic basis to support our sup-porters out of Government. So, you’re going to always have a problem holding onto these people. It’s a transactional world now; they will ask you what you are doing for me. Love is not enough. No money, no love. You have to be able to do things differently,” Jordan said.
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