Guyana Parliament - 11 May 2015

[Famous Mortimer]

We seemed to have missed elections in Guyana. All the more embarrassing because they turned out to actually be interesting. The Indo-Guyanese People's Progressive Party (PPP) had won every election since 1992, that is to say, every free election ever basically. This time though, elections were won by the Afro-Guyanese People's National Congress (PNC), although the PNC ran as part of an alliance with several smaller parties called A Partnership for National Unity.

In Guyana, the Parliament elects the president (there's also a PM appointed by the president but they don't do much). After the elections, PNC leader David Granger became president.

According to Wikipedia, Guyana is: 44% Indian, 30% Black, 17% mixed, 9% indigenous.

So the PNC must have won a significant number of non-Black Guyanese votes.

Final results were:

APNU 50.29% and 33 seats
PPP 49.20% and 32 seats

Aside from the ethnic angle, both parties are officially socialist. However, the PPP is more radical. In fact, the PPP is still officially a Marxist party. Because of this, the West supported a PNC government which rigged elections from the 1960s until the 1990s. Really though, ethnicity is main dividing point.

[Zanas]

Your post just made me look this up and realize there were pretty large Indian (as in Hindi) populations in Guyana, as well as in neighbouring Suriname and Trinidad-and-Tobago. Who knew. Fascinating.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

How embarassing. Politicus and hash leave for less than a month and we are starting to drop the ball guys

[Famous Mortimer]

Your post just made me look this up and realize there were pretty large Indian (as in Hindi) populations in Guyana, as well as in neighbouring Suriname and Trinidad-and-Tobago. Who knew. Fascinating.

Yep, the descendants of indentured servants brought over by the British.

Same reason there are Indians in Fiji.

Where I live in New York, there are whole enclaves of Indo-Guyanese. If you see an Indian person, it's more likely they're from Guyana or Trinidad than from India.

I'm told there are a lot of Afro-Guyanese too but they just blend in to the local Black population.

[Famous Mortimer]

Fun fact if anyone didn't know: Although the PPP is mostly Indian, it was led for a time by a White Jewish lady from Chicago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Jagan