Political parties are formed because people of similar political philosophies join together to try to gain power in order to put those ideas to work.It’s that simple, and it’s what makes the talks now apparently going on between the United Bermuda Party and the Bermuda Democratic Alliance so interesting.Without reading too much into the Warwick South Central by-election, it must be clear that as things stand, neither the remains of the United Bermuda Party nor the beginnings of the Bermuda Democratic Alliance would stand a chance of forming a Government if an election was called tomorrow.Instead, there is a real risk that what happened to them in Warwick South Central will happen again. They will split the vote, thus allowing the PLP a majority of the proportions of 1985 when Sir John Swan’s UBP took 31 out of 40 seats.As Deputy UBP leader Trevor Moniz said, if that scenario unfolded, then the BDA would be lucky to keep one of its three seats. The UBP, in the meantime, would probably hold on to four or five of its safest seats and would remain the official Opposition.It is said that the BDA’s MPs have come to recognize this while leader Craig Cannonier and others still think the BDA can supplant the UBP and move into power.That seems overly optimistic.The UBP and the BDA remain very close in terms of ideology. The UBP still has organisational heft, but is dragged down by its legacy. The BDA is fresh and new, but as Warwick South Central showed, it has not been able to draw sufficient dissatisfied UBP and PLP voters to become the official opposition.It has not yet been able to differentiate itself from either party to stand on its own. Too often, it seems to say the same thing as the UBP or offers statements that are so bland as to be meaningless. Saying you are neither the UBP nor the PLP is not enough.In the meantime, the UBP is unable to shake its legacy, and its brand is now so poisoned (partly by its own actions and partly by those of others) that it seems unlikely that it can recover.Its recent roll-out of candidates shows how weak it is. Without offering any disrespect to the new candidates, most are former MPs or candidates, or complete neophytes like Devrae Noel-Simmons. To its credit, the BDA has been able to attract new candidates and members, many of whom are disillusioned with the PLP but would never join the UBP.So in that sense, the current talks make sense for both parties, especially if a new political entity emerges.If this party could offer a genuine alternative to the PLP, which in turn could break the racial nature of politics in Bermuda and offered a fiscally conservative political view, then it might stand a real chance, and could lead to an historical political realignment in Bermuda where the parties would be separated into broadly liberal and conservative lines, as opposed to the current situation where they tend to be divided on racial lines instead.