OPINION - CLAIRE BONELLO | Sunday, 15 July 2007

Vongole or votes?

On several occasions, the editor of this newspaper Saviour Balzan has written of his intention to organize a day trip to Sicily on election day. He says that his voting document will be poked into his pet budgie’s cage and he and the growing number of Maltese citizens who are disgusted with the state of Maltese politics will have a short break from our shores to savour a marinara feast across the waters. Circumstances have changed somewhat since the invitation to Montalbano country was made and it seems that budgie will have to make do with the standard lettuce leaf instead of the voting document to nibble on, as Balzan may vote after all.
However surveys show that there is a sizable chunk of the population which has no intention of going down to the polling booth on election day. At times studies have pointed out that the ranks of the non-voters have swelled to 22.1 per cent of the electorate with both major parties facing a wave of disillusionment. Of course it is early days yet and perhaps when election fever really catches on, everybody and his invalid relatives will somehow find themselves marking their voting preferences just as they have always done since they turned eighteen. Still, the fact that there are no major issues of the “Independence/Integration” or “E.U. or No E.U” type to be addressed, the quasi-identical Tweedledee Tweedledum images of the PN and the MLP and the impression that the people in Parliament are more windbags than admirable representatives, may lead people to think that their vote does not make a difference. These people have adopted the view that the nation is already going to hell in a handcart and their vote will hardly be an effective brake. Far better to abandon any hope of change being brought about by politicians or government, keep their heads down and go about their daily business without having any expectations of improvement.
Increasingly, I find that more people have come to believe in the adage “If voting could change anything, they’d make it illegal” which is often attributed to the anarchist Emma Goldman. Just as she held that only direct or revolutionary action could shake things up, such people are of the opinion that a five-yearly outing to the polling booth is hardly going to usher in a new era of efficiency and good governance. These, then are the people who are opting-out, the no-shows who might just tilt the balance one way or another in the next election.
While being very well aware of the fact that no political party will be able to transform all our lives into unalloyed bliss and to turn this into a model country, I still think that opting out of the voting system is defeatist and useless. It is defeatist because if one is turning one’s back on the democratic process in the belief that the candidates are all fools or knaves and cannot be trusted to run a country, then by not voting, you are effectively making it easier for the fools and knaves to be voted into power and to continue making a pig’s ear out of their job. If people don’t bother to vote, they are relinquishing their say, however small, in the way the country is governed. And if their inaction indirectly leads to the election of a party whose policies or candidates they find detestable, they cannot wake up mid-term and start moaning about “what they’re doing”. Or rather, they can, but it would be too late in the day for that kind of talk and they would have contributed to a state of affairs where politicians they don’t like or admire do things they oppose. To quote a saying found on many Sixties badges and buttons, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”
Unless there’s an absence of reasonable alternatives it’s pretty pointless trying to register a protest or one’s objection to a political party by not-voting. All that will happen in such a case is that you leave other people – the voters - to do the deciding for you, perhaps without the desired result. So, if you’re completely disenchanted with the Nationalists and cannot wait to see the back of them, it might be risky to try to “show them” by forsaking the polling booth. What could happen is that thousands of shaky voters heed Joe Saliba’s rallying cries and urgent exhortations to do their duty and return to power the party you don’t want in government for the time being. Also, not voting may be interpreted in a variety of ways. For example, British minister Jack Straw declared that low voter turn-out in U.K. elections in 2001 was due to what he termed the “politics of content” and that people stayed at home because they were satisfied with government’s actions.

Some people may not realize it, but what they’ve had enough of is not politics, but the current Maltese political system – for that read “a bi-partisan system where the PN and the MLP alternate power”. It is a system in which one party rubbishes the other, only to do carry out the policies it criticized when in opposition. It is a system which caters for majority views and which results in sidelining minority interests. It is a system whereby the two major parties are heavily dependent on financing from certain lobby groups, leaving the parties indebted to them and paving the way for corruption and patronage. This is what people are really sick and tired off. They may continue hoping for a new and improved PN or MLP – but unlike razor blades and hamburgers, political parties are not improved unless there’s an incentive to do so. The possibility of losing the election to each other isn’t really incentive enough and will not herald a change in the way we do politics. It will simply mean an alternation in power. Although the two-party system has become so deeply ingrained in the national psyche that we think it’s the only possible system, potential voters and reluctant ones should look into the possibility of having a greater choice of political parties to represent them. Another party in parliament might not be a silver bullet and cure all our woes in one fell swoop, but it might help bring about a culture change, represent minority and unpopular interests and be a liberal foil to the fundamentalism and hypocritical movements that are the real threat today. With a consistent track record Alternattiva Demokrattika would seem to be an ideal vehicle to initiate the change we need. It remains to be seen if voters say that they want change but cannot be bothered to vote for it.

The newest political party on the block Azzjoni Nazzjonali lists immigration as one of its main concerns. The collators of the party’s manifesto have forwarded the “One-month-then-send-the-immigrants-packing” solution to what they perceive as a threat, or competition, to Maltese workers. It is therefore ironic to see how one of AN’s main exponents- Anglu Xuereb - has utilized the foreign labour of such immigrants. Anybody passing by Xuereb’s soon to be opened hotel “The Palace” in Sliema, over the last few weeks, would have seen dozens of non-Maltese men hard at work. In the sweltering heat when it was far too uncomfortable to contemplate doing anything more strenuous than sipping an iced drink, the construction workers were slaving away. They were working at such a cracking pace that if you walked past the site and popped into the butcher, you’d find that there had been considerable progress in the time that it took to grab your fillet and barbecue sausages. It was like watching those cartoons where Bugs Bunny or the Roadrunner builds a house in a matter of seconds, slapping on cement and bricks to build a hideaway from some cartoon enemy. The contradictory aspect about the whole business is that while the AN leadership rants about the barbarians at the doors and about how they are going to be a drain on our resources with their rabbit-like breeding tendencies and dependency on our welfare system, one of the AN’s main exponents is harnessing the labour power of the said barbarians to his own ends. Anglu Xuereb cannot be faulted for employing the non-Maltese workers. He has done what any employer would do – taken on workers who will carry out the task required of them. However things have come to a pretty pass if voters cannot recognize the inherent hypocrisy of a movement with leaders who try to hint darkly at the bleak future Malta faces if it has to accommodate foreigners who then proceed to employ foreigners themselves. But then, why am I surprised? The “Do as I say and not as I do” dictum has been the hallmark of politicians of both the major political parties, and now, it would seem also that of the AN. There’s nothing that new about the newest political party after all.
cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt