I am more than a little tired of all the nonsense that is being said and written about coalition governments. A coalition government in Malta exists only in the pipedreams of Alternattiva, and of the people they have somehow managed to convince that it is a possibility, and that there will be a coalition because they say so. A political party does not need an absolute majority (50 per cent + 1) of first preference votes to form the government. It needs a relative majority, which means more votes than the other parties, even if this is less than 50 per cent. All the Labour Party needs to govern is more first preference votes than the Nationalist Party, and vice versa. Neither of them needs Alternattiva, and should they decide they want Alternattiva, which is different to needing them, then it will still make no difference at all. If the Nationalist Party has more votes than Labour it will govern without the need to form a coalition with AD, and if it has fewer votes than Labour, Labour governs, also without AD. How difficult is this to understand? It’s not difficult to spin, though, and AD, aided and abetted by Labour’s whispering campaigns, are doing quite a lot of spinning.
If one party wins the right to govern, the other two parties can’t get together and say: “Oh, between us we have more votes then you, so the government is ours.” That’s not how it works. This is how it works: winner takes all.
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None of the Labour Party’s supporters are switching to Alternattiva. The reasons they’re not switching are twofold: the party has been in Opposition for two terms, which marshals the vote, and Alternattiva’s people and policies are not attractive to those who would ordinarily support Labour. They are only attractive to people who support the policies and outlook of the Nationalist Party, but who have for some reason decided that they have more chance of getting what they want through a party with one or no seats in Parliament than through a party that is able to form a government. These people seem to believe that if you have one parliamentary seat then not only can you influence legislation, but you can actually legislate. You can only use one seat to influence legislation if that seat forms part of a band of many other seats under the umbrella of the same party with a narrow majority in Parliament, as Dom Mintoff famously demonstrated in the summer of 1998. You cannot shape legislation with one seat if that seat is the only one you have.
When people tell me that they will be voting Alternattiva because they want divorce, or a greater crackdown on bird-shooting, my response is this: as with everything in life, take the road that can actually help you achieve your objective. In other words, what exactly is the point of voting for Alternattiva for divorce or rent reform when Alternattiva is never going to be in a position either to legislate or to influence legislation. I too am in favour of divorce for those who want it, and for rent reform for those who need it, but I have the good sense to realise that to make these changes, a political party has to gain the seat of government, and not a seat in Parliament. It doesn’t take a mathematical expert to work out that the likelihood of divorce being introduced and rent laws reformed by a Nationalist government is statistically much higher than the likelihood of those changes being brought about by a party with one seat in Parliament, which is roughly zilch.
You can take the attitude that the more parties there are in Parliament, the merrier. Ah, but here’s the rub. A multi-party system functions well if all the parties are roughly equal in strength, or if at least two of the parties are strong enough to oppose each other, so that one stops the other getting out of hand. Because Alternattiva can only grow at the expense of the Nationalist Party (try as it might, it remains resolutely unattractive to Labour), the net result of a growth in voters for Alternattiva will be a weakened Nationalist Party that is not strong enough to oppose the Labour Party, which has stayed the same in strength. The Labour Party has given the country a lot of trouble even with a strong Nationalist Party to oppose it. I hate to think what it would be like unrestrained.
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The assumption that our two-party system is primitive and needs to evolve into something more sophisticated (a multi-party system) is fallacious. The current system is a highly evolved one. It has evolved over more than a century. More to the point, it has evolved from a multi-party system. Those parties fell by the wayside or merged with others to develop into the Nationalist/Labour system we have today. To call it primitive or inadequate is to be simplistic. Our system of the alternation of power between the Nationalist Party and the Labour Party is no more primitive or inadequate than the system that serves the world’s two most highly evolved (and oldest) democracies: Britain and the United States of America. The English parliament is the world’s oldest one, and has served as the model for many others, including our own, though our electoral system is very different. The British, as opposed to English, Parliament has seen the alternation of power between the Whigs and the Tories, or their political descendants, for 300 years, with the very occasional Liberal prime minister. In the United States, the presidency alternates between the Democrats and the Republicans. What some people are saying is that what has been good enough for Britain for three centuries, and what is good enough for the largest democracy in the world, the United States, is not good enough for Malta, with its 450,000 people and its 43-year-old statehood, which apparently “needs” several parties in its 65-seat parliament.
Was Malta better off in the days of il-partit ta’ Strickland, il-partit ta’ Ganado, il-partit ta’ Boffa and all the rest? Somehow, I doubt it. My family supported il-partit ta’ Strickland, and were somewhat at a loss when the party folded. But now we rather like the Nationalist Party. We think it has done a super job of building Malta into what it is today, from the wreckage left behind by the Labour Party, and the fresh disasters created by the “new” Labour government of Alfred Sant. If the Maltese were so happy with those many little parties, we would have kept them. But we didn’t. More and more of us kept voting for the same two parties, until those parties grew into what they are today. They grew because we wanted them to grow, because we voted for them. They didn’t grow because somebody was pouring artificial fertiliser around their roots. Like everything else in life, their growth has been a response to demand.
Quite frankly, people like the system because, for all its shortcomings, it is efficient. We go to the polls only every five years, unless the Prime Minister blows a gasket and calls a snap election after 22 months, because of a quarrel with one of his backbenchers. We are not plagued by the uncertainties and instabilities of many coalition governments, like Italy’s. When we vote for a party, we know roughly what to expect when it is in government. We know that if it is an anti-divorce party, for example, then we will get an anti-divorce government, and not a government that is a coalition between an anti-divorce party and a pro-divorce party. Some people think that the clash of policies in a coalition government is actually a good thing because the coalition parties are obliged to compromise. I don’t think it’s a good thing, but a bad one. When I vote for a party, I want it to deliver on what it promises. I don’t want it to negotiate with another party and then to compromise on what it has promised.
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One person described the present system to me as “tyranny of the majority.” I was rather surprised. Majority rule underpins democracy. Without the principle of majority rule, what are you left with? You are left with anarchy, in which nobody rules, or a dictatorship, in which one person rules all the time. Even with a coalition government the principle of majority rule is at work: the voters of one party allied with the voters of another, to form a majority.
When political party systems evolve over a long time, as Malta’s has done, people end up with the system that best suits them and their political culture. We tend to forget that despite the anti-British tirades of, in turn, the Nationalist Party and Dom Mintoff’s party, the Maltese have rather more in common with the British than we do with the Italians. This is a negative where food and aesthetics are concerned. It is a positive in everything else, including politics. The British Liberal Party has shrunk tremendously over the years, and though it still has many seats in the House, it no longer has any prospect of governing and can do nothing to influence legislation or policy, which is shaped, as in Malta, by either one of the two leading parties in government. The British seem content to like one party, dislike the other, or be indifferent to both. The Italians, with whom we are told we have so much in common but don’t, are all over the place politically, and we’re not.
Germany and Italy have been cited as European exemplars of the multi-party system. They are unfortunate examples, and not just because the Italian system is absolutely chaotic. There is a historical reason why the political system and culture in those two countries militates against the overriding growth of political parties: fascism. The horrible experience of the past shapes the present. The Scandinavian model is also put forward as an example, but this Scandinavian model, like Scandinavian models in all other areas besides the political system, is tailor-made for Scandinavians. You cannot take a political system out of one culture and force it on another. Political systems have to evolve. They cannot be imposed. And in any case, you cannot conclude that the Scandinavian model is the nirvana of politics, while the alternation of power between two parties is the nadir. They’re just different systems that suit different countries.
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I think that Alternattiva and those who repeat its opinions will find that coalitions anywhere are not formed between a political party with 48 per cent of the vote and another party with a single seat in the House. If a party were to obtain 48 per cent of the vote, it would govern outright. Why on earth would it want or need a coalition with that kind of support? You see, this is the fallacy in all these arguments: that a coalition is a desirable objective, rather than a necessary evil. The countries that have coalition governments have them because they have no choice, because no party is strong enough to carry the government alone, and because no single party has sufficient backing from the electorate. The reason that a coalition government is impossible in Malta is not “because of the electoral system”, but because something like 96 per cent of the electorate votes for either the Labour Party or the Nationalist Party. With that kind of turnout, and with that level of support for the two parties, where is the scope for a coalition? There isn’t any.
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Another mistake that is being made is that it is desirable to have lots of parties in Parliament for its own sake. Does it have to be me to point out that it doesn’t matter how many parties there are in Opposition as long as there is one party in government? What difference does it make to the price of eggs if there are more than two parties in Parliament, when only one party forms the government? The only difference it makes is a negative one, not positive: a weakened Opposition. The Opposition is formed by the party with the next largest vote, and not by all the parties who have seats in Parliament but not the government.
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Aren’t we forgetting something here? All the arguments being put forward as justification for a seat in the House for the “goodies” (I beg to differ as to whether they are goodies, but anyway) also apply to the “baddies”. You can’t argue for Alternattiva’s “right” to a seat in the House without also arguing for the same right for Norman Lowell’s Imperium Europa, should they decide to content the general election as they did the MEP elections, and also for Josie Muscat’s party. If Alternattiva “deserves” a seat, then how come these others don’t deserve one, too? Because we like Alternattiva but we don’t like Norman Lowell? That’s not very democratic. If we’re talking about the assumed right to representation based on popular support, then Norman Lowell, if his party contests, has as much right to a seat as Alternattiva does. You can’t argue that Alternattiva has different “rights” to Imperium Europa just because you like the one and not the other. I’m not sure that many of those who are arguing for a seat in the house for “poor Harry” realise that their arguments also apply to poor Norman and poor Josie. They might not be too delighted at this realisation.
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All these arguments are pointless in any case, because when the two main political parties share roughly 96 per cent of the vote between them, there is no scope for a coalition, which is why the system elects a one-party government and not a coalition. It’s not necessarily the electoral system that has to be changed (though the district boundaries, which favour the Labour Party, must surely be made fairer). It’s the voting preferences of the Maltese, and those are not changed by legislation or electoral systems. Alternattiva assumes that with a different electoral system, more people would vote for it. This is an unsafe assumption, particularly if the party is extrapolating from the MEP elections, when it gained 23,000 votes. The variables that affect the way people vote in MEP and local council elections are not the same as those that affect the way they vote in a general election, when they are choosing a government and not something that will have little or no effect on their lives.
Some people will vote for Alternattiva in the upcoming general election out of genuine conviction. They are the party’s core support, the equivalent of the 45 per cent of Labour voters that never shift even if a prancing chimp or talking parrot is chosen as the next leader of the party. I would hazard a guess that they amount to something like 0.8 per cent of the electorate. All the rest are protest votes, which means that they are not coming to the party out of conviction, but out of anger with the rest. Listening carefully, what I hear is not “I am going to vote AD because I really like their policies” but “I am going to vote AD because I am sick of the government, I hate Labour, and we need a change”. Let’s leave aside the irony of someone who doesn’t want Sant as Prime Minister voting to get exactly that. What we have here are people who are giving a vote to AD because they are fed-up of the Nationalists, but only for now. They are fed-up of the Nationalists only until Labour makes them even more fed-up, and then they will vote for the Nationalists again, and not for Alternattiva. Why? Because they will have woken up to the fact that when you vote, you don’t choose a party, you choose a government. And even if you are voting for a small party without a chance in hell of ever forming a government, you are still choosing a government because your vote affects the choice of government indirectly, but affects it all the same.
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Lots of people who are planning to vote for AD don’t have a clue what their policies or stand-points are, though some of them might have the vaguest of ideas. Others don’t even care what the policies are. The other day I was talking to an acquaintance who is a right-wing conservative Catholic, who believes in devils and exorcism, and who runs a small business. He is going to vote AD – left wing, pro-divorce, anti-business and for a more secular government (a laudable objective, this last one) – because he is sick of the government. I was bug-eyed with consternation. How do you vote for a party when its policies clash with your beliefs? Oh, it’s a protest vote, and they’ll never be in a position to implement those policies anyway. Ditto the anti-divorce ladies who are voting for a pro-divorce party because they are sick of the Nationalists. Go figure.
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Those who are planning to vote AD are being told that if they do so instead of voting for the Nationalists, and Sant becomes Prime Minister, then “it’s not your fault; it’s the fault of the Nationalist Party for not changing the electoral system.” Over the past week, I have heard this excuse from the mouth of every person planning to vote AD. They are as “on message” as Blair’s Labour Party in 1997. Whoever is feeding the excuse into the system is doing it very well, which is unsurprising as they have the Labour spin-machine to help them (the enemy of my enemy is my friend). You can see at once that it is an attempt at self-exculpation – the realisation that what they are doing is wrong, that they are irresponsible to contribute to the risk of electing Alfred Sant, but they want to salve their consciences while doing it all the same. I’m sorry to have to put them straight. A sign of maturity is taking responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions. As for “the right to vote as I please” – well, actually what you have is a right to vote, full-stop, and that right, like all other rights, comes with obligations: in this case, to vote responsibly.