Puerto Rico has been a territory of the United States since the 1898 Spanish-American War. It had only US-appointed governors until 1948, and in 1952, Congress passed a joint resolution that approved its first constitution, which provided for limited autonomy. It would become a “Commonwealth,” but the island remained an unincorporated territory that lacked sovereignty and full rights afforded to US citizens, despite the fact that residents of Puerto Rico were granted citizenship in 1917.

Since then, the island’s politics have revolved around three political parties whose platforms are focused on its political status: the pro-Commonwealth Popular Democratic Party (PDP), the pro-statehood New Progressive Party (PNP), and the pro-sovereign Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP). Beginning in the 1930s, a series of uprisings by nationalist forces have been met with repression by US agencies (notably the FBI, which maintained extensive files of suspected “subversives”), minimizing the voter base for the Independence Party and creating a two-party duopoly consisting of the PDP and PNP.
In the 2010s, the combination of Congress’s imposition of a Fiscal Oversight and Management Board (FOMB) to restructure Puerto Rico’s $72 billion debt and the devastating natural disaster of Hurricane Maria had the effect of shaking the island’s residents’ faith in the two-party duopoly.

The FOMB made it clear that the local government was not in charge of the island’s finances, neutering the Commonwealth’s illusory autonomy, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) poor response to Maria made Puerto Ricans doubt the pro-statehood party. As a result, a new, possibly game-changing element will be a feature of the elections in Puerto Rico this November. The newly created Citizens’ Victory Movement (MVC) and the PIP will form a coalition (called La Alianza) to pool their growing constituency in an attempt to further erode, if not destroy, the existing two-party system comprised of the PNP and PDP.