The lat­est par­ty on the po­lit­i­cal land­scape, the Third Force Move­ment, may have failed, from the first day of its launch last week, to neu­tralise the dead­liest of Trinidad and To­ba­go's po­lit­i­cal weapons–satire and in­nu­en­do.The par­ty's lead­ers, who in­clude two com­mu­ni­ca­tions con­sul­tants, failed to an­tic­i­pate how read­i­ly their par­ty's name could be used for scat­o­log­i­cal hu­mour.

Apart from that, the main spokes­men, even while of­fer­ing a new vi­sion, re­act­ed like typ­i­cal politi­cians when con­front­ed with hard ques­tions. For in­stance, promis­ing to be trans­par­ent about cam­paign fi­nance, par­ty founder Tim­o­thy Hamel-Smith used ex­act­ly the same ar­gu­ment as PNM spokes­men, say­ing they would not tie their hands be­hind their backs by re­veal­ing their fi­nanciers un­less the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress and the Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment al­so did so.

Po­lit­i­cal com­men­ta­tors gen­er­al­ly be­lieve that the Third Force Move­ment, the Move­ment for So­cial Jus­tice, the In­de­pen­dent Lib­er­al Par­ty and, very prob­a­bly, the Con­gress of the Peo­ple, will have lit­tle or no im­pact try­ing to break up the po­lit­i­cal du­op­oly in T&T.To some ex­tent, the in­abil­i­ty of third par­ties to get seats in Par­lia­ment is a func­tion of the First Past The Post rather than the de­mo­c­ra­t­ic process it­self.

A sig­nif­i­cant per­cent­age of vot­ers do not sup­port ei­ther of the main par­ties. In 1981, to cite the most in­fa­mous ex­am­ple, the PNM won of­fice with 52.6 per cent of the votes cast and 26 seats; the Unit­ed Labour Front formed the Op­po­si­tion with eight seats; but the Or­gan­i­sa­tion for Na­tion­al Re­con­struc­tion, which got 22.1 per cent of the votes, got no seats at all.

At the oth­er end of the scale, when the PNM was re­duced to a piti­ful three seats in Par­lia­ment af­ter the 1986 elec­tion, the par­ty still got 31.8 per cent of the votes. Most re­cent­ly, the COP got 22.7 per cent of the votes in 2007, but no seats.

That par­ty on­ly got in­to gov­ern­ment through its coali­tion arrange­ment with the UNC and, hav­ing done so, seems to have de­stroyed the "new pol­i­tics" brand which had won it vot­ers' sup­port, if not seats. But this does not mean that this third con­stituen­cy has van­ished.It is just that vot­ers who do not sup­port the UNC or PNM now do not have a po­lit­i­cal ve­hi­cle to board. This is the biggest chal­lenge fac­ing the Third Force.

This is un­for­tu­nate in sev­er­al ways. First, it is un­healthy for any democ­ra­cy to have a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the elec­torate es­sen­tial­ly shut out of gov­ern­ment. Sec­ond­ly, this is es­pe­cial­ly per­ni­cious when that seg­ment com­pris­es the mid­dle class of the so­ci­ety, inas­much as mid­dle-class as­pi­ra­tion is a dri­ving force in many pro­gres­sive so­ci­eties.

The so­lu­tion, it would seem, is con­sid­er­ing al­ter­na­tives to the FPTP sys­tem such as range vot­ing, which fa­cil­i­tates a more ac­cu­rate re­flec­tion of the spread of votes across par­ties big and small, or by de­sign­ing adap­ta­tions to FPTP. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, what is tech­ni­cal­ly easy is po­lit­i­cal­ly hard.

At present, too many nar­row in­ter­ests are served by our de­fec­tive po­lit­i­cal sys­tem and it is hard to see the two par­ties com­ing to­geth­er to en­sure more po­lit­i­cal in­clu­sion of oth­ers, as they would have to, to ef­fect a fun­da­men­tal change to the sys­tem.Third par­ties de­serve to suc­ceed, if on­ly for the fact they have a con­stituen­cy–a con­stituen­cy that re­mains un­served be­cause of the po­lit­i­cal sys­tem.