Opinion | Sunday, 09 May 2010

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Perversity, thy name is politics...

Like many people born in the early 1970s, I was brought up on a strict diet of Riley’s Potato Crisps, Lemonora, Eileen Montesin, and... bullshit.
For the purposes of this article I shall limit myself only to the ‘bullshit’ part (personally I have rather fond memories of Riley’s Potato Crisps, if not exactly of the other two. Remember the ad on Xandir Malta? The one with that obese kid stuffing his face, while a Heavy Metal outfit sang ‘My Name Is Potato’ in the background? Ah, the good old days...)

But never mind. I’m in the mood for bullshit today, and as far as that particular substance is concerned, I have to admit the stuff we were weaned on back then makes today’s variety look like a load of... well... bovine excrement.
As I recall, the basic core belief in the compendium of political mythology was roughly this: that Malta’s democracy was under threat, primarily because the motor of its democracy (i.e., Parliament) had been rendered all but completely dysfunctional because of constant tinkering to the system by the Mintoff/KMB administrations of government.
There were of course other factors that threatened democracy at the time – not least, the relative inability to speak your mind without having the crap kicked out of you – but the single event that arguably pushed the country over the edge (according to the myth, I feel I ought to stress) was the notorious outcome of the 1981 election: when Labour had engineered things in such a way as to hammer together an absolute majority of seats, without achieving the corresponding majority of votes in the plebiscite.

Placed in the context of that other great myth, “parliamentary democracy”, this was the political equivalent of heresy. By our understanding at the time – an understanding which hasn’t changed much in over 20 years – democracy meant ‘majority rule’... nothing more, nothing less. Parties could not therefore expect to govern without the necessary popular mandate. As for Opposition parties which achieve absolute majorities without securing a majority in the House... these are automatically entitled to form governments, regardless of whether the Constitution actually gives them that right or not.
And this, more or less, was the dynamic that set the stage for the six troublesome years to come.

So far, I admit it is hard to extricate the myth from the reality which it resembles so closely. For tensions did indeed reach an all-time high in the 1980s. I wasn’t joking about the possibility of being kicked to pieces a few paragraphs further up... and matters were not helped much by the fact that Mintoff (and later KMB) proceeded to enact some of his most controversial policies precisely after 1981: i.e., at a time when he technically lacked an electoral mandate to even govern.
But there is another, oft-overlooked dimension to the same political reality. By projecting the 1981 result as ‘perverse’ – a term coined by Fenech Adami himself, in what I must concede was an astonishing stroke of political genius – the Nationalist opposition also insinuated that the entire country was in a state of political ‘abnormality’.
In so doing, Fenech Adami created a framework scenario within which practically any measure he concocted– even if harebrained or ill-conceived – could always be retrospectively justified as a necessary (and therefore legitimate) evil.
And because of the Messianic status he enjoyed by virtue of the selfsame myth, Eddie Fenech Adami also knew he could rely on blind, unthinking and unwavering support for practically any initiative he chose to launch. Hence the political genius alluded to above: through the choice of a single word, he had not only pronounced the entire Mintoff administration ‘tyrannical’ and ‘unfit to govern’ – he had also subliminally elevated himself from ‘Opposition leader’, to ‘leader of the Resistance’.

The upshot is that when Eddie Fenech Adami decided to boycott parliament in 1981, it was generally assumed (by Nationalists) that it was the right course of action to take. What else could one do, faced with the sheer audacity of a government without the necessary mandate? And apart from being both necessary and legitimate, Eddie’s parliamentary boycott was also transformed by mythology into an ultimately successful measure, which (among other things) proved instrumental in securing the all-important Constitutional amendment of 1987. But there is another version of events that is arguably less popular among Nationalist circles. In a recent interview, former President Vincent Tabone revealed that the PN parliamentary group had been viscerally divided over the boycott idea at the time. He himself thought it was sheer madness: a dangerous gamble which could quite easily have resulted in the loss of democracy altogether. After all (Tabone argued) nearby Italy had paved the way to plenipotentiary status for Benito Mussolini precisely by means of a parliamentary boycott, which enabled the Fascist leader to change the Constitution at will.
But mythology prevailed over misgivings, and the rest is history.

Back to the future, and I have noticed that Nationalists today don’t like to dwell much on the parliamentary boycott of 1981. They prefer talking about the shooting of Raymond Caruana, the incident at Tal-Barrani, weddings at Zejtun and funerals in Gudja. In fact the boycott of ’81 is hardly ever mentioned at all, and I suspect the reason is that Malta has since been exposed to far greater helpings of foreign politics than ever before... and as such, we can now perceive that such ‘perverse’ results are actually much more commonplace than any of us previously imagined.
Last Thursday’s UK election is as good an example as any. As things panned out, David Cameron’s Conservative Party attracted by far the greater share of the popular vote... but failed to achieve an outright majority in the House of Commons. Labour’s Gordon Brown, on the other hand, was all-but annihilated by the electorate... and yet, lo and behold: there is every possibility that Labour may nonetheless cling to power thanks to a backdoor deal with Nick Clegg, who is deemed far likelier to team up with Labour than with the Tories.
Other possible outcomes include a minority Tory government, which has to rely on the support of smaller parties on every single parliamentary vote. Using Fenech Adami terminology... are these not all ‘perverse’ results? And how would Britain react, if Cameron or Brown were to announce a fully-fledged boycott of parliament, in protest against one compromise or another?

And yet, perverse or otherwise, the UK result this week simply pales into insignificance compared to the incongruous (some would say tragic) result of the 2000 USA election. On that occasion, Al Gore conceded halfway through a recount which – had it been allowed to run its full course – would have actually granted him a clear victory. As things happen, George W. Bush ruled as President of the United States for four whole years without an electoral mandate... and we all know how controversial some of his first-term decisions were.

Turning away from far-flung (and, let’s face it, incomprehensible) countries, and even a cursory glance at today’s Parliamentary composition suggests that ‘perversity’ has never been too far behind. For while Britain comes to terms with its first hung parliament since 1974, Malta only very recently witnessed its first relative minority government since the 1950s. The result? Five sitting government MPs, who managed to land themselves their seats in parliament without actually being voted in by the electorate.

In all this talk of ‘perversity’ and the need to avoid it, we seem to have lost sight of the actual meaning of the word. If governing without a mandate is ‘perverse’... what do you call the practice of simply dishing out seats to unelected candidates? Well, that’s precisely the system we have at present. If Lawrence Gonzi is Prime Minister at all, it’s not because he achieved 50%+1 of the popular vote... he didn’t... but because our system allows to the Constitution to double up as the political equivalent of ‘magical top-hat’... out pop the exact number of seats necessary to make up a parliamentary majority (five, in the case of the last election)... even if their occupants failed to actually make their quota.

It seems there is perversity lurking around every corner of every corridor in the entire edifice of Maltese politics... for precisely like the Mintoff/KMB administration of ’81-87, Gonzi’s present government appears to have reserved its most controversial decisions precisely for the term when it lacks the necessary mandate to justify them. Considering their behaviour in Parliament this week, you would honestly think they actually won the last election without a little help from the Constitutional ‘mechanism’. But then again, you’d hardly recognise these people as the same Nationalists who fought so hard against political perversity in the 1980s... now would you?

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