On 9 May, 1987, the Maltese were called to vote in what turned out to be a watershed election, one that ended 16 years of Socialist rule and put the Nationalist Party in power, the first step towards taking Malta towards European Union membership. Twenty-five years later, Stephen Calleja met the two political leaders of the time, the then Prime Minister Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici and the then Opposition Leader Eddie Fenech Adami. Predictably, they have different views on what happened in the months leading up to that election.

Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici’s foremost recollection of the 1987 election was not what happened on the actual day, but the visit he said he had from the then Nationalist Party Leader Eddie Fenech Adami and deputy leader Guido de Marco some time before.

The former Labour Prime Minister said that his political rivals had gone to his office in Castille to express their concern over information they had received to the effect that, if the PN were seen to be winning the election during the vote counting process at Hal Far, thugs would make their way into the counting hall to destroy everything they could find.

“What I did was to inform the heads of the task force and the Armed Forces of Malta, and I instructed them to have two lines of defence on either side of the counting hall and prevent all unauthorised people from getting close, even if people had to die in the process,” he said. “I had to ensure that the counting process continued right till the end.

“When it was clear to me that the Nationalist Party had won the election, I called the then Acting President Paul Xuereb to tell him that I was conceding defeat. I did this before the official result was made known. A few incidents were reported; even my house in Hamrun was attacked, but these are normal at a time of euphoria,” he said.

Asked whether the 1987 election was the start of Malta’s road towards European Union membership, a decision Dr Mifsud Bonnici is still against as he heads the anti-EU group Campaign for National Independence, the former PM said that the process had started long before then. “In February 1979, a month before the British Forces left the islands for good, the Nationalist Party passed a resolution stating that the country should move towards joining [the then European Economic Community]. They were afraid that the British would leave a vacuum and that Malta was heading towards an autocratic leadership.”

MLP ‘morally correct’ to govern in 1981

Dr Mifsud Bonnici is convinced that the Labour Party was both constitutionally and morally correct in staying in government in 1981 when it had won fewer votes but more seats in Parliament.

“It happens in other countries that parties govern without a majority. In England, you never have a party that has an absolute majority of votes. In the US, Bush [junior] had become president in spite of obtaining fewer votes than [Al] Gore,” he said.

And it is still happening in Malta today, he added. In Mosta, the mayor comes from the Nationalist Party in spite of the Labour Party obtaining more first count votes, and in recent years this had also been the case in Mqabba and Mellieha.

“It is a question of mathematics. Today, the Nationalist Party is in government without having the support of the majority. If you counted the votes obtained by the Labour Party and Alternattiva Demokratika, they have more votes than the PN,” he added.

In 1981 there was no other solution than for the Labour Party to govern, said Dr Mifsud Bonnici. However, he admitted that it was a perverse result, one that exposed a great defect in our electoral system and one that the Labour Party immediately tried to ensure was never repeated.

This was why constitutional amendments were enacted to allow for extra MPs to be appointed to Parliament if the same thing happened in subsequent elections. These amendments were necessary to correct the flaw there was in the proportional representation system based on a number of districts, he said.

When it was pointed out to him that the 1981 result had led to a period of great difficulty for Malta, with years of strife and political violence, Dr Mifsud Bonnici said that what happened between 1981 and 1987 was “a product of the violent militancy” of the Nationalist Party.

PN had an ‘interest’ to create instability

The Labour government had no interest in causing instability, he said. It was the Nationalist Party that had been interested in creating an untenable situation.

He admitted that the incidents at the Curia in 1984 – when Labour thugs had entered the headquarters of the Church and smashed everything they came across – can never be justified. But, he recalled, at the time the government was in a direct clash over the future of Church schools, and also at loggerheads with the Malta Union of Teachers.

And it was not unheard of that Labour supporters were provoked into reacting badly, he said. Ultimately, however: “I was the one who lost the most [because of the violence] on a political level. Apart from the victims of these incidents, the indirect consequence was that I and the Labour Party suffered too.”

Dr Mifsud Bonnici still feels he was justified in not allowing a PN mass meeting to take place in Zejtun in late 1986. “It was humanly impossible to ensure that a PN mass meeting in Zejtun could be held without incident,” he said, “and that is why, in spite of the Constitutional Court ruling that the meeting could take place, I was still of the opinion that, in the interests of law and order, it should not.”

Would it not have been better to allow the meeting to be held while controlling the socialist thugs who wanted to prevent it? “It was impossible to control the situation. It is the Nationalist Party’s fault because it insisted that the Zejtun meeting be held, in spite of knowing that such incidents could take place.”

The Zejtun incidents were followed a week later with the murder of Raymond Caruana at the Gudja PN Club, and it was this that saw the beginning of the process to change the Constitution to allow for the party obtaining the majority of votes to be elected to government, even when it had fewer parliamentary seats. “Discussions between [Dom] Mintoff and the PN had started in 1984 [when Dr Mifsud Bonnici had become Prime Minister],” Dr Mifsud Bonnici said. But after the Raymond Caruana murder the discussions were stepped up and in February 1987 they were finalised and passed through Parliament.

Agreement to appoint Mintoff President

Dr Mifsud Bonnici said that the changes that were discussed went beyond amendments to the electoral law. There were negotiations on increasing the powers given to the President of the Republic, he said, and “there was also agreement that Mintoff should become President, a position I think he deserved. But [in 1989] the PN chose Censu Tabone as the new President”.

This was the main reason why the Labour Party had boycotted Dr Tabone, he said.

In the pre-1987 election negotiations, the Labour Party had scored its own victory by forcing the Nationalist Party to sign for the entrenchment of the neutrality and non-alignment clause in the Constitution in exchange for the amendments to the electoral law.

“By being aligned, we open our way to taking part in wars that are not ours. But apart from the egoistic reasoning, it is morally sound to have such a clause because it means that Malta is against any war. In 1987, it was the time to push the PN to accept such a clause because all they were interested in was changing the electoral law.”

Dr Mifsud Bonnici is still adamantly in favour of retaining the clause. “It is wrong to say today that the United States is the only superpower. China is a superpower too, and India will soon become one. In 1987, we had a bipolar situation. Today, we have a multi-polar situation.”

Students at university ‘are unemployed’

One of the accusations levelled at the Labour Party is that it tried to win the 1987 election by employing 8,000 people on the eve of the election. “The government did not employ 8,000. We employed 1,000, and the rest were employed with parastatal corporations,” said Dr Mifsud Bonnici, ignoring the fact that these corporations were set up and controlled by the government.

“If we did wrong, then the Nationalist Party was wrong too in keeping them in employment after it won the election,” he said. The PN was actually fulfilling its promise to these workers that their employment would be retained if the PN was returned to power, a position the PN considered necessary as it believed it could politically counter Labour’s efforts to win more votes.

Taking the cue from the subject of employment, Dr Mifsud Bonnici said it was wrong to believe that today Malta has only 6,000 people who are unemployed. “With them, we must also count the 13,000 plus who are still studying,” he said. “They are not productive and so must be counted as unemployed,” he insisted.

Does this not mean that the country is investing in its education system to offer many possibilities to today’s young people? “No,” he said. “People over 18 who are not productive must be counted as unemployed,” he reiterated.

Why should we

import things we can produce here?

Dr Mifsud Bonnici believes that today’s Labour Party, despite still having MPs who were part of his 1984-1987 government, has shifted away from the ideal for which it used to work for in the past – that of guaranteeing social justice.

“Social injustice is growing, not decreasing, but the Labour Party is not focusing on this. It should return to the times when it ensured that anything that could be produced locally should not be imported from abroad,” he said, bringing back memories of the 1980s, when bringing in foreign chocolate, pasta and many other products was prohibited.

“Why should we import furniture, when we can make it ourselves?” he asked. “Why should we import all the doors that were fitted at Mater Dei Hospital? We are losing our skills. Today everyone works on a computer,” he added.

When asked if he was against computers, he replied: “What I am saying is that we are losing our ability to produce.”

MLP government ‘politically responsible’ for violence

Eddie Fenech Adami, former Prime Minister, describes the 1987 election as one of great tension at a time when the country was politically divided, but one in which there was a great determination from the Nationalist Party to give Malta the new beginning it deserved.

“The people realised what was at stake in that election. It was not only the election of MPs to represent them in Parliament, it was the election that was needed to bring about the change that was required at the time, one that was based on the slogan of employment, justice and freedom,” he said.

But it was not just a slogan, he quickly pointed out. It was the way the people wanted their country to be run, with a government that guaranteed work opportunities, saw that justice was being done and safeguarded their liberties.

Successive Nationalist Party governments worked to build an economy that created jobs, made sure that the rule of law was accepted by one and all, and that the Maltese people were guaranteed the liberties they enjoy today. The 1987 election slogan is still valid today, 25 years down the line, said Dr Fenech Adami.

His first thoughts, when it became clear that the Nationalist Party was going to win the election, were that all kinds of incidents should be avoided. “This was why, together with [then Prime Minister] Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici we went on national TV to tell people not to go out on to the streets to demonstrate, whatever the result was.”

Voting took place on 9 May 1987, but it took more than two days for the Electoral Commission to announce the results, which took place at 4am on Tuesday, 12 May.

Two hours earlier, at about 2am, Dr Fenech Adami said he received a call from the then Acting President Paul Xuereb, who informed the PN leader that Dr Mifsud Bonnici had conceded defeat.

“He asked me to go to the Palace to be sworn in as Prime Minister there and then, but I told him that the matter could wait until the morning, and that until that time, Dr Mifsud Bonnici was still responsible as head of government. It was at 11am that day that I was sworn in as Malta’s Prime Minister,” he said.

‘Victory came at a cost’

The PN victory came after a fierce campaign, one that practically began right after the perverse 1981 election result – when the Labour Party had won more seats in the House despite receiving fewer votes. The victory also came at a cost, and Dr Fenech Adami mentions the murder of Raymond Caruana as the darkest episode in a string of violent events that characterised those five years of Labour rule.

“Actually, they were five years and five months, because the Labour government held the election on the last possible date, a full three months after Parliament had been dissolved. And in those three months, the Labour government did everything in its power to manipulate the electorate, most notably through the offering of jobs with the government for those who were registering for work,” he said.

As a party, the PN had told the people given jobs to take them, and that they would retain them if the PN won the election. This, of course, came at an expense for the exchequer, but there was no option. In all, some 8,000 jobs were given in this way before the 1987 election, apart from other favours.

This was the main reason why the Nationalist Party won by fewer than 5,000 votes, in spite of all that had taken place under 16 years of Socialist rule. “I have no doubt that the favours granted before the 1987 election reduced the margin of our victory,” said Dr Fenech Adami.

The Labour government, he said, was politically responsible for all the incidents that had taken place in the months leading up to the 1987 election. Apart from the Raymond Caruana murder, there were the incidents in Zejtun when the PN was prevented from holding a mass meeting there, and other violent events that created so much tension in the country.

This is why instead of replying to the “irrelevant” budget in December 1986, Dr Fenech Adami chose to speak about everything that was taking place in Malta in what was probably the most remarkable speech of his political career. After that, the two parties sat down together to find ways and means of resolving the situation.

Restoring Malta’s

credibility abroad

But this came at a price too, because the Labour Party wanted to include a neutrality and non-alignment clause in the Constitution. “We had argued against this, saying that it was a mistake to include such a clause in the Constitution but, in the end, we had to accept it because all we were interested in was the amendments to the electoral law (which guaranteed that the party winning the majority of votes would be allowed to govern, irrespective of the number of parliamentary seats obtained),” Dr Fenech Adami said.

One of the first priorities after the 1987 election was to restore Malta’s credibility abroad, he added. Under Socialist rule, Malta had established close links with the Libyan and North Korean regimes, and the West did not look on the country with a favourable eye.

“We needed to build our reputation again. The then Foreign Minister Censu Tabone argued that the best way to do this was to immediately apply to join the European Economic Community [now EU], but my opinion was that it would be wrong for us to do so at a time when the country still needed to find its feet. We wanted to put our house in order first.”

As it happened, it was not until 1990 that Malta applied, and it was Prof. Guido de Marco who did so, having replaced Dr Tabone as Foreign Minister after Dr Tabone was appointed President.

But Dr Tabone had done a great job as Foreign Minister to re-establish links with the West. He was the most experienced politician, having served under Dr George Borg Olivier in the 1966-1971 government, and had a solid reputation abroad, not only in the political sphere.

“I remember that, soon after I became PN leader in 1977, a PN delegation had gone to China. We wanted to visit a hospital and when we went there, someone recognised Dr Tabone as the eye specialist who had eradicated trachoma from Taiwan, and they held a great reception for us,” Dr Fenech Adami recalled.

Toughest election

The former Prime Minister said that the 1987 election was the toughest he had fought as a party leader, far more difficult than another watershed election, the one of 2003.

“In 1987, we had arrived after years of political violence and great difficulties. That victory paved the way for great changes in Malta – changes that ultimately led to Malta joining the European Union. In 2003, we were fighting for our ideal of becoming EU members. And here we had an advantage because [then Labour leader] Alfred Sant had wanted an election to confirm the EU referendum result.”

Dr Fenech Adami described this as a great political mistake, as it was inconceivable that people would first vote for European membership and then, six weeks later, vote for a Labour Party that was against membership.

Between 1987 and 1992, Dr Fenech Adami led a government that had a one-seat majority, similar to the one Dr Lawrence Gonzi is leading as Prime Minister today. But Dr Fenech Adami did not have to face the internal strife with which Dr Gonzi is having to deal.

Asked to compare the two situations, Dr Fenech Adami said that “when decisions are taken collectively, everyone is expected to stick to the decision taken and toe the party line. Appeasement is not the best way forward. When you are part of a team, you have to abide by the decisions taken.”

Without mentioning Franco Debono’s name, Dr Fenech Adami said that the individual’s bluff should be called.

The 1987 election was the beginning of almost 25 years of Nationalist rule, excluding a 22-month stint for the Labour Party between 1996 and 1998.

PN can win again

Asked whether the PN can retain power for a fourth consecutive term, Dr Fenech Adami said that, usually, political parties that have been in government for two terms then lose an election. In Malta, the PN has managed to win three in a row, and therefore a fourth victory would seem unlikely – if the political opponents, the Labour Party, were credible.

But, he said, unfortunately the Labour Party is still not a credible alternative, not even with a new leader.

Joseph Muscat, he said, had made the fundamental error of surrounding himself with people from Labour’s 1980s, including former Foreign Minister Alex Sceberras Trigona, whose foreign policy was completely wrong and is still completely wrong.

“Dr Muscat [When he was elected party leader four years ago] was given an opportunity to win the election on a silver plate. But what he has done in the last four years has reduced his credibility. The PN therefore has a chance of winning again.”