Following the 8 March general election, the leadership race of the Labour Party started. This triggered off a whole discussion on the party’s internal electoral system, about who is entitled to choose the new Labour leader. There are two main internal factions, those who insist that this is the prerogative of the party delegates as envisaged by the party statute, and those who insist that all paid up members should be given the right to vote. In my opinion the latter view should prevail if the Labour Party does not want to create an internal democratic deficit. Apart from the leadership issue, both major parties must start giving voice to their members on policy making.

But what is the meaning of democratic deficit? It is a situation in which political structures, organisations, or decision-making processes lack democratic legitimacy. In other words there is no direct representation. What should be done to defeat democratic deficit? First of all a serious attempt should be made to bring the nature and modus operandi of the political parties into line with the changes in the electorate, many of whom are more articulate now, clearly interested in ad hoc public issues but not having much need to identify with particular organisations, groups or ideologies.

Parties are nowadays no longer the guardians of ideologies or the representatives of stable, historically-rooted groups of like-minded people. In the circumstances they need to move towards being centres to encourage and facilitate the discussion of public issues by experts, those working in the particular field and groups of interested citizens. They need to bring programmatic coherence and consistency to the results of these debates and present the resulting proposals to those who have taken part and then to their party members for approval. They also need to recruit people, from among those who have taken an active part in the debate, who are willing and able to put forward these proposals in their council or parliament and where possible translate them into policy, giving all their members an opportunity to elect their representatives to direct and oversee the policy as part of the programme. In other words the parties need to be much more open to interested citizens in their policy-making.

Both the government and the opposition need to make real efforts to deal with people’s specific needs and complaints. They should not just pass motions and amendments, they should stand side-by-side with citizens and help them when the bureaucracy or with the institutions that are slow, unfair or deaf to their problems. In other words they should demonstrate in their day-to-day work what they stand for and help citizens confront the authorities or interest groups when there are abuses. They need to go into the communities, not to listen or to preach, but to help people and in the process gain the experience they need for their programmes and their political work.

I believe in Malta many functional public organisations are not coordinated with one another and not geared to the scale of the democratic system, they escape transparent democratic influence and supervision. At national level the horde of separate ministries, the many devolved government agencies and independent administrative bodies make integrated and effective governance more difficult.

This reduces the effectiveness and decisiveness of policy and makes it more difficult for both the public and the administrators to have an overview of, and control over, democratic decision-making on many public issues. If policy is to be more effective, and above all if the democratic system is to be more transparent to voters, public decision-making more accountable, and political power clearer and easier for voters to influence, we need to reorganise our local, and national systems of administration and plot our political landscape and political system afresh.

After all these reforms have also been promised by Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi during the electoral campaign and to be fair he has already appointed a slimmer executive, which can be interpreted as a sign towards change and real effective governance.

Notary Joseph

Louis Attard

Xaghra