Michael Falzon | Sunday, 04 January 2009

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Choosing the next President

In three months’ time it will be 3 April 2009, and Edward Fenech Adami’s five-year stint as President of the Republic will come to an end. If the recent pattern of the appointment of Maltese Presidents is followed, by that day the House of Representatives would have nominated his successor.
A report in Illum two weeks ago, saying that Labour leader Joseph Muscat is pushing the name of former Labour Minister and veteran politician Lino Spiteri for the post, provoked a negative reaction from veteran Labour correspondent Lino Cassar, writing in the GWU Sunday it-Torċa. Lino Spiteri has been a controversial figure in Labour circles ever since he resigned from his post of Minister of Finance, a few months after Alfred Sant’s 1996 electoral triumph. Later he explained that he had disagreed completely with Sant about the removal of VAT – an idea that Sant had sprung on him unawares and without any formal party decision some time before the 1996 election. He later even said that it was idiotic for him to accept his Ministerial post when he disagreed so much with what had become official government policy. He was also publicly in favour of Malta becoming a European Union member, another policy disagreement with Alfred Sant
The fact that Lino Spiteri had contested the post of MLP leader against Alfred Sant – an election in which allegations of vote-rigging were never satisfactorily quelled – had soured relations between erstwhile friends Sant and Spiteri for a long time.
No wonder that a Labour veteran such as Lino Cassar saw red (or was it blue?) when Lino Spiteri’s name was touted as Muscat’s choice for the next president. It was no coincidence that last Monday – the day after Cassar’s angry comments appeared in print – the GWU daily l-orizzont, dedicated a full front page to the idea of an agreement between Government and Opposition on the choice of the next president. The story quoted Joseph Muscat saying that he will be giving Government a list of possible candidates, without saying whether the list will be in order of preference!
Cynical rumour-mongers insist that Prime Minister Gonzi and Joseph Muscat have already ‘agreed’ on Lino Spiteri’s nomination and the present Muscat antics are simply an effort at reinforcing the perception that Lino Spiteri would be a compromise candidate arrived at after much tugging by the two sides. Time will tell whether this is true or not.
If there is an agreement between the two sides in Parliament on the choice of President, it will be the first time this happened since the appointment of Sir Anthony Mamo as Malta’s first President following the declaration of Malta as a Republic in December 1974.
What happened following that historic ‘agreement’ is well worth reviewing, considering what is being said today on the way the President should be chosen. I had just entered Parliament in 1976 when, in December of that year, George Borg Olivier called a meeting of the Parliamentary group to discuss how to tackle the motion nominating the next President. Borg Olivier told us that he had received a telephone call from a high ranking civil servant in the Office of the Prime Minister who had told him that Prime Minister Dom Mintoff would be nominating Anton Buttigieg – then MLP Deputy Leader and a Minister in the newly appointed Cabinet – as Malta’s second President.
The parliamentary group was shocked – both at the way the message was transmitted and at the actual choice of a controversial political figure. There was no way how the Opposition could vote in favour of this nomination. Borg Olivier, however, was intelligently cautious. He disagreed with the nomination but also realised that the Opposition had to keep good relations with whoever was Head of Sate. For him, exposing the negative aspects of Anton Buttigieg on the eve of his becoming president was not on. In the end, he persuaded the Parliamentary group that no one from the Opposition should talk about the nomination while Nationalist MPs were to say ‘no’ when the question is put before the House – without, however, asking for a division. I must admit that today, 32 years after the event, I appreciate Borg Olivier’s wisdom much more than I did then.
The subsequent president was Agatha Barbara, approved by parliament when the Opposition was boycotting sittings following the perverse result of 1981 election which saw the MLP garnering a majority of seats with a minority of votes: the result of blatant gerrymandering in the distribution of electoral districts. If there was a time when an agreement on the choice of President was paramount for the country’s democracy it must have been then. But it was not to be and the country had to suffer another five turbulent years and arrive at the very brink of mayhem until there was a conciliatory move from the MLP.
Barbara’s term ended before the 1987 election and the two sides agreed on the nomination of Paul Xuereb as acting president ad interim with a decision on the new President to be taken after the election. Xuereb served the country well during the 1987 transfer of power process. However Prime Minsiter Fenech Adami always felt that having an Acting President, rather than a fully-fledged President, indicated that the country was not in a state of normalcy.
Efforts to find a non-political figure to be appointed President with the agreement of both parties in Parliament failed miserably. So the government side chose Censu Tabone as president as of 4 April 1989. The MLP’s reaction was hostile. Forgetting the way they had appointed previous presidents, Labour attacked Tabone during the discussion on his nomination, asked for a division and voted against his nomination. Later they even started off by boycotting Tabone, saying that he was President of only half Malta. The same story repeated itself every five years when Ugo Mifsud Bonnici, Guido DeMarco and Edward Fenech Adami were appointed Presidents, like clockwork on 4 April.
It is incredible how the very pattern of behaviour set out by the MLP in government is unacceptable to the MLP when it is in Opposition. This ‘two-weights, two-measures’ attitude is what bugs me most about the MLP.
Even so, today everyone agrees that ‘without exception’ all those who served as Presidents, ‘honoured the position they served in’ – to quote a recent article by Lino Spiteri himself about the issue.
So is it time for the country to dump the tradition of appointing as President an active political figure from the party in government – a tradition started by the MLP in government? I am not yet convinced.

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