A lovely title, don’t you think? Almost a throwback to another era, when mass meetings were disrupted by bell-ringing and the coolest buzzword in politics was “interdiction”. I also like it because it is provocative – because I have discovered this week that many a person who counts himself nationalist cannot bear the thought of having the names Gonzi and Mintoff in the same sentence.

Throughout the last election campaign I argued that there would be no winner in the election, only losers – the main loser being the “average voter”. Many misunderstood my intentions; some labelled me an Alternattiva activist for campaigning against the “wasted vote” idea. Labourites called me a “nationalist in disguise”, when I reasoned that Labour was guilty of not providing a valid alternative to government, and the Nationalists insisted that I was an ungrateful git and could not understand why I owed my vote to the party that showers all that “gid” on the people.

Call me a masochist, but I seem to have a knack of “setting myself up as an object of hate” – as one particular blog reader once told me. My point back then was (and still is) that the very absence of a valid alternative was leading to a level of complacency by the party in government that no citizen should accept. Now, before the apologists start baying, let’s get some things clear. I do not think that we live in a country that has the democratic level of Zimbabwe or North Korea. Neither am I the type of person who goes around with a file claiming this or that conspiracy theory – believing that Gonzi, Saliba and the RCC hatched some mysterious plot to rule Malta for ever after. No sir. Allow me to explain.

Standards of democracy

If I ask you to define democracy, you will probably come up with the standard definition: “government by the people for the people”. You would not be wrong. There is no doubt that it is the commonly held view of most of the people in this country that what we have is government by the people for the people. Every democracy sets its rules for how this should work. Most opt for the separation of power – a legislative to enact laws, an executive to execute them and a judiciary to ensure that the law is being observed. Democracy is also about how the citizen is allowed to live within his society – which is how the package of human rights has developed as a universally accepted set of standards. At the basis of most democracies nowadays is a basic law – a guide to how the democracy is to be run. We call it the constitution. In the United Kingdom, where no written constitution exists, it is a collection of principles resulting from the interaction of a supreme parliament (that can will pigs to fly, if it wants to) and the jurisprudence of its judiciary. That kind of system operates under the Rule of Law. In any case, there are clear parameters within which the democratic society exists.

Last week I referred to the Mintoff-Gonzi comparison. I stated that both the 1981 Mintoff government and the 2008 Gonzi government were democratically elected. It was a fact. They were elected under the rules of the land and nobody could deny that. The word “gerrymandering” immediately surfaced in comments on my blog. Mintoff’s government “cheated” – they said – because it changed districts to ensure it had a majority of seats. That too is a fact. Our laws needed tweaking after that in order to ensure that such an unfortunate event would not be repeated. More importantly, the nation realised that never again should a vote for the majority play second fiddle to a vote for the minority. And this is why we have the system of compensating seats. Last summer further changes were made. This time, the two parties in power realised that, should a third party garner a large enough vote, then they might end up with both parties having fewer than 50 per cent of the popular vote.

So they tweaked the system again. In doing so, they had the opportunity to improve the “representative” aspect of our electoral system. They could have introduced a threshold for third parties that would allow such third parties representation in parliament. That is called proportional representation. Instead, the two parties chose to use the term “proportional” only in the case where two parties were elected to parliament – and to hell with the rest. When it came to voting time, we were dutifully presented with the “Wasted Vote” argument – one that was to surface again in the election in neighbouring Italy. A vote for a third party would be “wasted” because it would effectively be a lost vote for one party and consequently a gain for the other. This was not “gerrymandering”. No districts were tampered with. In my books, the voter’s right to decide had still been hijacked. By shifting the parameters in such a manner, the MLPN had practically dissuaded voters from voting otherwise.

This is not a plea in favour of Alternattiva. I ask you to consider this in objective terms. In a hypothetical future election, in which you would not like to vote for the party in government and you do not see the second party as a viable alternative, you might be directly affected by this situation. Providing a threshold for a third party means creating the incentive for all parties in the system to get their act together. The more competition there is for the voters’ attention, the more a party is on guard and the more it will invest in getting its policies right. Getting the policies right means listening to the people and reacting on the basis of what they want. As we stand, we run the same risk of having parties that can count on not really needing to know what people want. We risk having elections that are contested on the “lesser evil” basis again and again. We risk campaigns becoming more marketing and less substance. We risk more theatrics like the JPO chase, the University Rabble and the empty promises.

So when I compare Mintoff’s government to Gonzi’s government I do not do it out of spite. I do it in order to provoke this kind of reasoning. Democracy is not a static concept. There are different levels of democracy and I like to think that in our country we will always strive to improve. Otherwise we risk hanging on to the two-tribe mentality forever.

Freedom of Information

It’s all in the detail, you know. Take the press for instance. I have to mention the incident that occurred during the press conference with French PM Francois Fillon last week. MaltaToday journalist Raphael Vassallo complained this week that the government information officer had ignored his calls for attention in order to ask a question during that press conference. It seems that the civil servant would only allow two questions – one from PBS and the other from Allied Newspapers. Right now there is much to discuss with the French Prime Minister, particularly on the subject of Franco-Maltese relations. A couple of subjects might not exactly be kosher for either of the governments involved, but this too is what living in a democracy is all about.

In case you were wondering, Raphael was interested in issues such as the incident involving a Maltese registered cargo ship that collided with a French fishing vessel killing 15 people in the process. He was also interested in seeing what guarantees Fillon’s government has with regard to its agreement with Libya to supply nuclear-technologies. The government senior information officer chose to signal to Raphael that his question would not be taken – only to deny after the conference was over that there had been any preferential treatment. Now do not rush off and mutter something about improbable conspiracy theories. What worries me is that this kind of thing might happen often and is taken for granted.

At the last election we had our fair share of worrying events related to the press. I wonder if many people caught the YouTube video of the One TV interview team being held under what was virtually citizen’s arrest in order to be prevented from interviewing Dr Gonzi. Gonzi’s party is the same one that deemed it fit to issue a dentist/politician with a press card, thus usurping all form of convention and rules so long as the ends justified the means. We may have some form of pluralism. We still have party-dominated television. We still find it hard to draw lines on the limits of sarcasm and satire (witness the BA decision regarding Teletubi). It’s all about standards of democracy. We may not be living in Zimbabwe, but that is the wrong litmus test to apply. We need to be applying one that tells us how much we need to improve in order to ensure a better quality of democratic living. And the two main parties have to bear much of the responsibility for this improvement.

Beyond Politics - Blognews

This has been a relatively quiet week, politically speaking. That did not prevent the net from being as active as ever. The Maltese blogosphere has continued to grow and more politicians have joined the blogging fold – Owen Bonnici, Keith Grech, Toni Abela and Wenzu Mintoff come to mind. It is an interesting phenomenon that people in opposition often make a greater effort to remain in contact with the people. I particularly found Owen Bonnici’s post about his first day in parliament very frank and “human”. You could almost picture yourself sitting close to Malta’s youngest MP as the rest of parliament took to pulling his leg in an amicable manner. Owen claims to have a lot of enthusiasm – lets hope that the hard day-to-day work does not dampen his spirit.

Another person to join the fold is Peppi Azzopardi. Peppi was unlucky enough to have the subject of one of his first posts fall under the tough scrutiny of J’accuse. I got miffed by a particular statement he made that can be roughly translated as follows: “In Malta we are still fixated that a book, TV or radio programme has to teach or have a message. Frankly I see this as an attitude of arrogance by those who think they are morally above the rest and who want to tell us how to live”. As I said in my blog, I do not take particular pleasure in picking on Mr Xarabank. Having said that, Peppi seems to confirm last week’s theory of Maltese relativism. What is it with this crusade against knowledge and meaning? What is it with this attempt at dumbing down? If Peppi wants to speak for the lesser educated, then he is more than free to do so. What I will continue to disagree with is his solution. The answer is not aiming for ignorant bliss but better education and the means to obtain it.

Peppi’s comment reminded me of Lucian Freud’s painting that broke the record for the sale of a painting by a living artist. It pictures a supersize lady reclining on a sofa in the nude. A Daily Mail article ranted on about how ugly the painting is, and how Freud has no respect for women. The painting sold for $33.6 million and I like it. No matter how much I can disagree with the columnist, the fact remains that we both derived our own conclusions as to meaning and aesthetic pleasure. In Malta we could probably launch a whole discussion as to whether money spent on that kind of art would be better spent on a proper Eurovision bid (How about that Pep?).

It’s all relative, really, but thank God for all these differences – otherwise we would all be the same and, before you know it, there would be no point in living in a democracy.

Jacques blogs daily on

http://jaccuse.wordpress.com

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