An old Westminster joke describes a young member of parliament sneaking out of his first parliamentary group meeting to take his place on the back benches of the House. A veteran MP followed this young man, placed a fatherly hand on the young man’s shoulder, and asked him what he was doing.
The excited freshman replied: “I can’t wait for my first glimpse of the enemy.”
The elder statesman shook his head sadly. “Those, my boy, are your political opponents. Your enemies are all on this side of the House”.
Sarcasm knows no bounds, but maybe things have not got so far in our House of Representatives. One could not say the same about rivalry among electoral candidates within each political party, as they jostle for survival under the proportional representation (PR) system. Whether a candidate is seeking the pole position in the constituency line-up, or is merely aspiring to a modest marginal success, no quarter is expected or given, particularly when candidates smell the aroma of an approaching election.
The ranks close after every electoral contest, by which time long-lasting damage to personal relations might have been inflicted and embedded in the memory of hard-nosed career politicians. Whether this is good for democracy or for the country is another matter.
PR, combined with the system of preference votes, opens the way for many permutations. It makes it possible for the different party machines to experiment in “electoral engineering”, for individual candidates to conjure up mutually-beneficial formulas and for specialists to devise imaginative schemes.
It is true that it is the individual elector who holds the trump card and decides what to do with his vote. But the extent to which these permutations gain circulation and mass electoral support nullifies the democratic process in that they introduce a “bloc-vote’.
The manipulation of this kind of bloc-vote plays havoc with the genuine democratic process, which presumes that the one-man-one-vote system represents the collective opinion of free citizens voting according to their “conscience”, in secrecy and in tranquillity, without outside pressure or influence on the part of sources with ulterior or even hidden motives.
Under the prevailing electoral system, the preferences of individual electors could also be frustrated by the different party machines in another way.
Our system permits candidates to contest two electoral districts. If a particular candidate is elected in two constituencies, it is the candidate concerned who decides which seat he is to give up. The electors have no say in the matter, but the party machines deploy their not inconsiderable influence to achieve party political gain, at the expense of constituency interest.
PR has its advantages. The biggest advantage is that it confers weighting to minority votes, and allows for a fairer representation in parliament, in that small parties have a fighting chance to be represented in parliament, in proportion to their strength.
Under the first-past-the-post system prevailing in the United Kingdom, for example, it is possible for one party to win every single constituency by a majority of one vote. If this were to happen, the victorious party would gobble up all the parliamentary seats, while the opposition parties, which would represent almost half of the national electorate, would not have a single seat in the House.
This is an extreme case. In reality, it often happens that the party is elected with a minority across the country and wins office.
All of this highlights the importance of a politically-enlightened electorate, with a stake in cultivating grass-root democracy. Individual electors must be made fully aware of the importance of their vote and of ensuring that this vote is an expression of their convictions and of their personal opinion. Mature electors will not allow themselves to be manipulated.
The next election will put the electorate to the test. For one thing, the difference between the main party programmes has dwindled, in view of the fact that they are making a bid for the middle ground. On the other hand, the complexities arising from Malta’s EU membership complicate the equation
When it comes to strengthening our democracy by providing, organising and creating other tools for workers, consumers and shareholders through access to justice, by protecting the health and safety rights of consumers in the market place, coping with law and order problems and so on, the main parties often speak the same language, albeit with their respective nuances. They are equally eloquent, on paper, in challenging abuse of concentrated power.
Raising expectation levels to get the main parties moving away from a competition between the “bad versus the worse” towards the “good versus the better”, requires a civic dynamic that is incompatible with the status quo.
The initiative must come from the so-called floating vote – which consists of voters who think with their own minds, and who do not rely on the party machines for their motivation.
The future of Maltese
democracy will depend on whether or not enough self-reliant citizens at the grass-roots show their muscle.
There is a danger that electors may so lower their expectations about what politics can mean for the nation’s future, that they
settle for diminishing returns.
Politics are corrupted, not just by money, but by being trivialised out of addressing the great enduring issues of who controls, who decides, who owns, who pays, who has a voice and access, and why solutions on the shelf are not applied to the existing and looming crises in our society, both local and global.
It is the active, enlightened and independent-minded electorate that can make the difference by centring on the basic issues of representative government, one of the purposes of which is to strengthen the usable tools of democracy
Mature electors must resist the entreaties of the remnants of the Old Order, whose track record is out of tune with their modern siren songs, with the same resolve that they are expected to show in curbing the excesses of monied interests.
They have it in their power to cleans the particular stable to which they belong and bring new faces and a new breeze that will give this young republic a new lease of life. What Malta needs, with increasing urgency, is a new breed of politicians who appeal, not to electoral fears, but to electoral hopes and aspirations.
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