Who is popular today?

THE MOVE by the Tobago-based Progressive Democratic Patriots (PDP) to set up shop in Trinidad, as well as former commissioner of police Gary Griffith’s launch of the National Transformation Alliance (NTA), has brought renewed focus on the place of new parties in this country’s politics.
It has also resulted in one former politician objecting to the phrase “third party.”
“I think the media rush to try to talk about third parties is simply to keep an old dogma intact,” said Winston Dookeran, former leader of the Congress of the People (COP). “When I got involved in the COP, it was seen in the eyes of the media, to our detriment, as a third party.” The rest, as implied by Mr Dookeran’s retelling, is history.
Such comments, published on World Press Freedom Day, resemble a case of shooting the messenger. It is the failure of the media, we are to understand, not the realities of race and patronage, that accounts for why so many third parties fail.
In other words, semantics, not politics, determines who rules the country. That’s a stretch.
In theory, the media, under siege by so many physical, economic and digital challenges these days, has a simple job: tell the truth.
But far too often it is politicians who come in the way of that.
There is no wicked plan by a journalistic cabal to keep the country hostage to the current political regime dominated by the two oldest parties.
Rather, the fact that there are perceived third parties is a direct result of a constitutional arrangement which prioritises the first-past-the-post-system over the will of the people and allows race-based voting to flourish.
Mr Dookeran, who had a chance to enact constitutional reform while in power as part of a coalition government, might do well to focus on these realities.
What made it possible for the COP, like the ONR before it, to attain widespread support but zero seats in Parliament was an archaic electoral system which allows only the winner to take all. By his own admission, Mr Dookeran’s party placed second in 22 seats, despite the seeming burden of the media’s language usage.
During the People’s Partnership government, a recommendation of the Constitution Reform Commission of “a mathematically accurate reflection of the wishes of the electorate in one of the Houses of Parliament” was, like so many proposals before it, left to languish. Why?
Mr Dookeran is correct to call for fresh thinking, however.
We need to change the dogma relating to voting systems and to campaign finance.
Political parties, both old and new, also must begin to address concretely the real needs of the people.
Or else, at this rate, nobody will care about first, second, third or fourth parties much longer.
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