The world of Maltese politics is indeed a weird one. We have a political system that should have been scrapped and replaced by something more straightforward. Instead we keep tinkering with the system until nobody knows how it works, let alone the fact that the great majority never knew how it worked in the first place.
Yet the two main parties are loathe to replace it with something simpler and are set on sticking on to a quota of a minimum of 16.66% of votes cast in a five-member electoral district, much to the chagrin of Alternattiva Demokratika.
But then Alternattiva are acting as if the electoral system has actually been changed and they are trying to sell the notion that they stand a chance not only of electing one or two MPs but also to be in a position whereby any Government (PN or MLP) would have to depend on their vote in Parliament.
This is, of course, absolutely impossible. If Alternattiva – or Azzjoni Nazzjonali for that matter – were to elect one or more MPs, we would automatically have Alfred Sant as Prime Minister with enough seats to do it alone.
The only way to avoid a Sant victory is for the electorate to elect a two-party Parliament with the PN getting at least one first preference vote more than the MLP. This is the harsh reality – the result of a revision of electoral boundaries expressly meant to give an advantage to the MLP. The whys and the wherefores of how this situation came about have been overtaken by events but the harsh reality has not dissolved into thin air.
I do not like it and I think that it is preposterous that we should be facing this conundrum - as much as I do not agree with the electoral system itself. But that does not make it disappear! Neither will any amount of whining from Harry Vassallo or Arnold Cassola change the situation.
Before the system was abused and then bastardized, it was designed to elect members to Parliament - not political parties to power. The vote was given to an individual, and to a certain extent it is still so. That is why there is so much competition between candidates of the same party. That is why the other week we had the spectacle of a surgeon making a fool of himself, attempting to garner personal votes because he operated on the Leader of his party!
Anyone who thinks that this sort of consideration is alien to the serious voter is hugely mistaken. When I was Minister of Education, there was an Education Division official who admired the way I had managed to push the division out of the laid back attitude for which it was known. Yet when push came to shove, this person voted for the doctor who had medicated an abscess in a very uncomfortable place. So don’t ask me what political elections have to do with odd medical interventions, because I know the answer.
The other week we witnessed yet another phenomenon of the weird world of Maltese politics – how the MLP are now using their foreign colleagues in the European Socialist party to improve their chances in the next election. In doing so they forgot all about the infamous ‘Foreign Interference Act’ that they had once enacted.
The GWU daily, l-orizzont found no problems splashing a story on its front page, quoting Danish Socialist Poul Nyrup Rasmussen saying that Malta needs a change of government. If a Nationalist newspaper had done something similar during the bad old Mintoff days, the editor would have landed in jail while the foreign politician would have been deported. Moreover, l-orizzont would have applauded all this with xenophobic glee! At that time it had defended the law – which sought to find a ‘reason’ why the PN had garnered the majority of votes in the 1981 election. Mintoff couldn’t stomach the fact that he had been beaten... so he argued that the other side had cheated because it was aided by foreigners who had no business interfering in our internal politics.
Present for the same MLP jamboree that included the pathetic speech delivered - gestures and all - by Sant’s surgeon, there was also British Health Secretary Alan Johnson who was impressed with the enthusiasm of the MLP delegates. Later he compared it with the enthusiasm of the delegates present at British Labour’s Conference just before John Major was soundly beaten by Tony Blair. Well, I have news for Alan Johnson: enthusiasm by party delegates before a general election is part of the weird world of Maltese politics. One has only to look back at the enthusiasm in the PN General Council prior to the 1996 election and at that of the MLP Conferences prior to the 1998 and 2003 elections. In Malta, the people who decide are those who stay at home and then do their own thing.
Incidentally Johnson’s choice of hotel (or was it Joe Mifsud’s?) led some twerp in the British press to make the stupid allegation that Johnson had come to Malta for plastic surgery. This was patently untrue and the weird world of Maltese politics must now be asking: What, no libel?
All that this country needed for its politics to become weirder and weirder was for Alfred Sant to declare publicly on television that once in government he would seek to renegotiate Malta’s accession treaty on certain areas like agriculture. And, by Jove, last Tuesday he did it!
No wonder that I often suspect that my trying to keep track of the weird world of Maltese politics is having devastating effects on my eternal struggle to retain my sanity.