The United National Congress (UNC) turned 25 years old last Wednesday and the party held an interfaith service to commemorate the event.The party is less than half the age of the country's other major political party, the People's National Movement (PNM), which celebrated its 58th anniversary earlier this year.
These two political parties have come to epitomise the two-party system that is envisaged in the Constitution. Since the birth of the UNC in 1989, it has formed three of the seven administrations that were appointed after general elections in 1991, 1995, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2007 and 2010.The first half of T&T's independent history saw no political change being engineered by the two-party system that was in place and the PNM was able to dominate all others.
However, the second half of the independent history of the country was the era in which political change entered the democratic process.The coalition method, wrapped up in a single party called the National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR), broke the stranglehold of the PNM on political power in 1986. However, it was out of the NAR that the UNC emerged and its rise to power was swift, as it only took six years for the UNC-NAR coalition to enter the corridors of power after its inception.
http://www.guardian.co.tt/digital/new-members