THE EDITOR: The leadership and spokespersons for the UNC denigrated minor parties, contending they don’t have much political support but make big demands and/or seek "outsized influence" in a proposed alliance and/or accommodation.
Evaluating small parties in terms of numbers suggests the party leadership and its cheerleaders and partisan commentators have not grasped "ethnicised politics" and will repeat past errors that led to electoral defeats.
Unless one studies or reads ethnic politics in political science or political sociology or cultural anthropology, one can’t understand the significance of small parties in a racially bipolarised society like TT.
Small parties influence the outcome of elections. Whichever major party, PNM or UNC, embraces the small parties will win the 2025 general election. If it is a straight PNM and UNC contest, the PNM will prevail.
The PNM has been and will remain the dominant party in the foreseeable future unless the UNC changes – reforms and rebuilds itself. Repeated defeats from 2015 and another in 2025 under the present leadership may well close the book on the future of the UNC and its 35-year history.
The UNC leadership and cheerleaders are right that small parties have limited support, but the view is partisan-driven. Minor parties don’t have much support or funding, but whatever following they have is critical to a major party and was shown to make a difference in UNC victories or defeats going back to 1991. They did and will influence the outcome of elections.
Every vote will become crucial in 2025. But the small parties' influence is not just in bringing their small numerical support, but also their "diverse ethnic optics" and "the symbolism" of unity, which makes a major party more attractive to voters.
The smaller parties may not win a single seat, but they can change the fortune of the UNC and the PNM, as obtained in previous elections. Aside from 2000, the UNC did not win an election on its own and even then it had "absorbed" minor parties and independent forces associated with the ONR and the NAR. The PNM lost government to a coalition in 1995.
No third-party candidate (minor party) in independent TT ever won a seat in a three-way contest, except in an accommodation as in 2010. When there was no accommodation, the UNC (TT Alliance) lost, as in 2007, 1981, 1991, 2001 and 2002.
The deck was and is stacked against third-party candidates to run and/or to win. But smaller parties can do damage to a major party. They caused the UNC to lose seats in 2001 and 2007. When the UNC failed to unite with or accommodate the small parties in 2002 and 2007, it lost seats.
When the small parties agglomerated under the COP and engaged in an accommodation with the UNC in 2010, it won. When the accommodation fell apart in 2015, the UNC lost. When the UNC failed to accommodate the smaller parties in 2020, it was defeated. And going it alone again in 2025, it will be resoundingly defeated. All poll findings are leading to that inevitable result.
The smaller parties re
