Azruddin Mohamed poses no electoral threat to PPP- Jagdeo

Last Updated on Saturday, 7 June 2025, 13:50 by Writer

General Secretary of the ruling People’s Progressive Party (PPP), Bharrat Jagdeo on Thursday said embattled city businessman Azruddin Mohamed’s bid for the presidency in the September 1, 2025 general and regional elections would not lead to his incumbent party’s defeat.

“We are not afraid of him,” Mr Jagdeo told his weekly news conference. “He’s not going to make any difference whatsoever.”

Using a rough estimated voter turnout of 500,000, Mr Jagdeo said if the PPP wins 60 percent or 300,000 votes, there would be another 200,000 persons who would vote for other political parties. By his predicted voter turnout, political parties would need about 7,692 votes to win one seat in the 65-member National Assembly. “We are not arrogant but we are confident that we will win the 2025 election…because of the work we have done. We have kept faith with the people of this country,” he said.

The PPP won 233,336 valid votes in the 2020 general election, and A Partnership for National Unity+Alliance For Change (APNU+AFC), 217,920 votes, and the remaining 9,096 votes were scattered among seven small parties. Of the 464,565 total votes cast, 460,352 were valid.

Edited videos posted on his Team Mohamed’s Facebook page show Mr. Mohamed attracting large numbers of people in Amerindian communities, as well as several Afro- and Indo-Guyanese villages. The videos mostly show attendees speaking at those engagements but none features the presidential hopeful delivering any address. Reacting to the turnouts by Amerindians, Mr Jagdeo said, “a lot of our party supporters” said they attended the meetings out of curiosity because they had never seen him. “When people go, it’s a mix and it’s small numbers.

The PPP had lost control of the Region Eight (Potaro-Siparuni) council to the APNU+AFC by one seat in the 2015 elections.

Heading into the 2025 elections, Mr Jagdeo shrugged off a question about whether he would strike an accommodation with Mr Mohamed’s so far unnamed political party if the PPP ends up with a plurality rather than a simple majority that would allow it to pass laws and the budget without the support of any other party in the National Assembly. “I’m not dealing with hypotheticals now,” he said.

Mr Jagdeo also dismissed Working People’s Alliance (WPA) forecasts that voting would be tight and reflect previous race-based voting patterns.

The PPP General Secretary, who is also Guyana’s 2nd Vice President, believed that Guyanese had concluded that Mr Mohamed “lacks any integrity” on matters such as the actual cost of his Lamborghini luxury car and the alleged smuggling of more than 10,000 kilogrammes of gold that resulted in the evasion of more than US$50 million in taxes to the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) between 2019 and 2023.