Malta’s Parliament is the only EU national parliament in which only two parties are represented. While the Nationalist and Labour Parties will hurriedly point out that this is the people’s will, the truth remains that the highest democratic institution in this country does not truly represent all political opinions in this country.
The truth is that both the PN and PL, despite years of total disagreement on practically everything, have always agreed on one thing: how to avoid a truly democratic reform and instead just tinker about with the electoral system to ensure the exclusion of multi-party representation in our Parliament.
The PN and the PL have done this repeatedly over the years with incredibly blinkered partisan short-sightedness. They have created a system in which a vote for the PN and the MLP counts for more than a vote for AD or any other party. A concrete example should highlight this cruel truth. With the tinkered mishmash of a system they created, during the last General Elections, the 1,600 vote advantage the PN had over PL was translated into the addition of four additional seats for the PN. In effect, these 1,600 voters are represented by four PN MPs: an average of 400 voters per MP. The 3,810 AD voters are represented by no-one.
The blatant injustice of this should be clear to all, but once the perpetrators of this injustice are the parties represented in Parliament who are also benefitting from this system, it seems highly unlikely that we will ever see the political courage to stop this crass discrimination.
In effect, the last amendments to the electoral law agreed between the PN and the MLP late in 2007 are a glaring example of partisan short-sightedness which goes against the national interest. The amendments were trumpeted as the end of all problems related to the gerrymandering of electoral districts. Strict proportionality between votes and seats in Parliament was depicted as doing away once and for all with the risk of a so-called “perverse” result. There again the PN and the MLP conveniently failed to emphasise that this strict proportionality between votes and seats was limited only to a situation where only two parties are elected to Parliament. In the case of a third party being elected this strict proportionality clause would not come into effect.
In their haste to create a system to fit their myopic vision of what democratic representation should be all about, the PN and MLP chose partisan expediency over the national interest. In 2007, only AD pointed out the inherent risk of such a system still leaving the possibility of gerrymandered districts creating a perverse result. In 2008 we were shown to be right, with the cruel political irony that the mechanism to rectify this perverse result means that 1,600 PN voters got to be represented by four MPS and 3,810 AD voters remained
Disenfranchised
Following the last general election result, the need for a just and fair electoral system is there for all to see. Lawrence Gonzi is on record as saying that such a reform is now a priority. Joseph Muscat made some promising early rumblings about this issue. One can only hope that the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition will try to regain the high moral ground by proposing an electoral system which is truly in the national interest. Early rumblings from the PN suggesting a 7.5% national threshold of votes for parliamentary representation are not encouraging. That would fly in the face of the EU norm, making it closer to non-EU Turkey’s 10% threshold than the threshold of any EU country currently using such system.
Whatever the reform proposed, one hopes that the national interest will prevail over the partisan interests of the major parties, and our country will be presented with a just, fair and democratic electoral reform which truly reflects the national interest.
With this in mind AD after the 2008 elections met with House of Representatives Speaker Louis Galea and submitted a proposal for reform.
This proposal widens the applicability of the constitutional mechanism for correcting the lack of proportionality of general election results to all political parties achieving a 2.5% threshold of first count votes. This balances issues of governability with the need to ensure that each vote has a bearing on the final result.
Stephen Cachia is deputy chairperson of Alternattiva Demokratika -The Green Party
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