The issue that the Nationalist Party has with the way in which those who have purchased Maltese citizenship are being enfranchised to vote is not so much an Opposition issue as it is a national issue that should affect each and every one of us to the core.

The right to vote is, after all, a sacrosanct right that needs to be applied appropriately in each and every instance. It is, in so many ways, the very essence of nationality.

This week the Nationalist Party turned matters up a notch and filed a judicial protest against the Justice Minister, Identity Malta and the Electoral Commission claiming that the details of such new citizens are not being passed on to the Electoral Commission in the correct way and that they are being added to the electoral register without informing the Electoral Commission. 

The PN also claims a breach of the Constitution in that such citizens are being granted the right to vote without fulfilling the requisites to do so.

While Identity Malta used to hand over the names of new citizens every month to the Electoral Commission, matters have changed since the introduction of the cash-for-passports scheme, as the names of new citizens are now being given to the Electoral Commission once a year, when the names of all new citizens are published. But they are still being added to the electoral register.

But what the Nationalist Party, in its complaints and arguments against the ways in which those particular new citizens have been enfranchised to vote, is not mentioning is how it and its rival Labour Party have for years on end denied Maltese-born citizens their right to vote.

One would have imagined that after all the controversy that had been raised over the citizenship by investment programme that the government would be going to extraordinary lengths to ensure the programme is following the letter of the law most precisely.

It is an open secret that the government has already ignored many of the requirements that passport-purchasing individuals need to fulfil in order to be granted citizenship, chief among which is the one-year effective residency requirement they need to meet in order to become a citizen of this country.

But it now transpires that the government is also granting the new citizens who purchased their Maltese nationality rights that actual born and bred Maltese citizens have been and are still being denied.

Over and above the very questionable ethical merits of selling citizenships in return for a cash payment, the fact that the government is defying the country’s very Constitution in order to give these cash-paying new citizens the right to vote is downright shocking.

And it becomes even more shocking when placed in the context of those Maltese citizens who are denied their right to vote by that same Constitution. This is an affront to the nation as a whole and it is a particular affront to the Maltese nationals who reside abroad, be it in Australia or as close by as Italy.

According to Malta’s Constitution, in order to be eligible to vote one must be over 18 years of age, have Maltese citizenship and to have aggregately lived in Malta for six months out of the 18 months prior to the publication of an electoral register.

Despite this, these same individuals have nevertheless been given the right to vote. By simple process of elimination, the criteria of being citizens had been met and those people were almost certainly over 18 years of age, which singles out the requirement to have lived in the country for six of the 18 months preceding an election.

The European Commission has been taking Malta to task since at least 2011 over this flagrant disenfranchisement of Maltese voters. Malta is, in fact, one of just five EU member states who inflict voter disenfranchisement on their citizens who live abroad. Out of those five countries (Malta plus Denmark, Ireland, Cyprus, and the United Kingdom) Malta’s six months out of the last 18 rule is viewed, by far, as the most prohibitive in the bloc.

But in the meantime it seems that just as the requirement to have lived in the country for an effective year before becoming a citizen is being waived time and time again for those purchasing citizenship – one of the European Commission’s foremost requirements when authorising Malta to proceed with the controversial programme – the government is also waiving the residency requirement when it comes to the right to vote. 

This is in an outright slap in the face to those Maltese who are continuously denied that very same right – itself a rarity in Europe and a state of affairs that Europe is attempting to force Malta to set right. One wonders how Europe will eventually react, in the context of the previous raging controversy over Malta’s IIP programme, to this new development.

One should also question if these new citizens even fulfil the aforementioned requisites to be able to vote in Maltese elections. If they are being given the right to vote without residing in the country for the appropriate periods leading up to an election, it would be an even bigger slap in the face to the Maltese who have been denied their right to vote for the very same reason.

Both matters need to be ironed out in the national interest and in the interest of democracy itself.