Source: Loop News
People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) Presidential candidate Dr Irfaan Ali has been declared the winner of Guyana’s disputed Regional and General Elections.
The declaration came from the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) on Sunday afternoon following a meeting of GECOM Commissioners and Chairman Claudette Singh.
Hours earlier, Singh had facilitated a call between President David Granger and Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo to discuss a solution to the five-month-long election impasse.
Chief Elections Officer Keith Lowenfield also submitted his election report using the figures obtained during the national recount, and it showed the PPP/C won the elections with 233,336 votes.
Granger’s A Partnership for National Unity + Alliance For Change (APNU+AFC) received 217,920 votes. A coalition of smaller parties received a combined 5,214 votes.
The PPP/C will have 33 seats in the National Assembly, APNU+AFC will have 31 seats and the smaller parties will have one seat.
The final result comes months after a consortium led by Exxon Mobil Corp began producing oil off Guyana’s coast, turning the impoverished country of fewer than 800,000 people into the world’s newest crude hot spot and promising to boost growth in the agriculture- and mining-dependent economy.
But the looming oil boom also raised the stakes of the country’s ethnically divided politics, with Indo-Guyanese, who primarily support the PPP, and Afro-Guyanese, who largely support Granger’s APNU-AFC coalition.
“There is only one future, and that future requires a united Guyana,” Ali said. “That future requires every Guyanese to play a part in building our country.”
The PPP has criticized the contract Granger’s government signed with Exxon – which includes a 2% royalty and a 50% profit share after cost recovery – as too generous, but Ali has stopped short of pledging to renegotiate the terms of the deal.
Exxon and Granger’s allies both say the terms are comparable to other frontier oil producers.
Granger declared victory days after the March vote, but the opposition said results from the largest voting district had been inflated to put Granger ahead of Ali and the country’s top court found the district had not counted votes in accordance with electoral laws.