After not watching the recent Xarabank debate between the Prime Minister and Opposition leader, I woke up the following Sunday with an appetite for some good, interesting and intelligent political commentary, so I grabbed my copy of The Spectator. It seems British contributors are following the local scene, as a contributor in the 8 March edition was questioning the usefulness of televised political debates. He must have known that our supreme leaders would be going head to head that week.
In fact, I am not sure whether by ‘our’ he meant British or Maltese. This political spectator revealed the reasons why he does not want televised debates held between the party leaders at their (or our?) next election: “I tell myself it is because these debates are so boring or because they confuse our parliamentary system with a presidential one...”
What he meant doesn’t really matter though: it describes the situation here as it is there.
Let’s face it, political debates here provide some sort of entertainment as novelty pieces, but once their novelty wears off they become the tedious routine of “I agree with whatever you don’t”. So we end up with intellectually challenged debates which are not very challenging to the intellect. The only fun to be had is through family games like Predictapol, where family members take it in turns to predict what the reply of a politician will be, what he will say next, what witty comeback he will come out with, and so on ad nauseam. Usually, everyone is a winner. It tends to become boring after a while.
But it’s not there that the striking resemblance lies. It’s not in boredom that you’d be forgiven for confusing the British and the Maltese scene – rather it’s in the confusion that you’d easily confuse one confused and confusing system for the other. It seems that, like our British counterparts, our televised debates are confusing our parliamentary system with a presidential one. Which is appropriate, given that our parliamentary system is based on the Westminster model.
The leaders have become presidential candidates – the party has taken the backbench. Mintoff, who in this showman-statesman sense was the quintessential political figure, so much so that many of his followers called themselves Mintoffjani, kept the party alive. His political persona may have overshadowed the party – and indeed everything else – but it was still very much a battle in the name of the party and its ideologies.
From what I did see of the Maltese debate, this has changed. If anything, we kept the party bit only in the way we do things. That is to say, politics has now become a big party, with cheers and jeers and lots of beers. The debate (which I assure you, I did not watch; honest!) was, from what I hear, deprived only of the latter, so much so that the teacher threatened to send unruly pupils out of the classroom. Two out of three is not bad. The leaders addressed each other with barely any reference to the party they belong to, criticizing each other on a personal level, much in the same vein as American presidential debates.
This is an interesting development because “the presidential-parliamentary distinction is foundational to comparative politics and at the centre of a large theoretical and empirical literature”. I’m quoting from a paper published in the British Journal of Political Science (“Beyond Presidentialism and Parliamentarism”, José Antonito Cheibub, Zachary Elkins and Tom Ginsburg) and which attacks this very dichotomy, suggesting that a fair degree of heterogeneity exists in many Constitutions, and that “in order to predict the powers of a country’s executive and legislature, it is more useful to know where and when the Constitution was written than whether the country has a presidential or parliamentary system.”
The classification should, in theory, allow us to predict the relationship between the executive and the legislature and their respective powers and responsibilities. It should also, again theoretically, shape and predict how an election campaign and a political debate take form. Reality has certainly dispelled this myth, as we have seen election campaigns taking the form of presidential campaigns, with the leader of the party being held as the primus inter pares, and, as we have or have not seen on television during that debate, debates are also assuming the form of presidential debates.
Of course, we still have a parliamentary system: we have an executive chosen by and responsible to an elective body, but the unwritten rules of the game – the rules that truly matter – are changing.
It is no surprise that we favour a presidential style, especially where media coverage is concerned. We are living in an age of the celebrity, the star, and we have replaced ideology with the cult of personhood. We need someone who is bigger than it all, and then we need to know every detail, intrude into their private life and reduce them to being smaller than anything else. We find pleasure in this: a sadistic pleasure driven by some sort of Freudian death drive, transmuting in a destructive instinct, seeking the death of the monster we create. It’s all very Frankensteinian.
Politics has become a show, and as Zygmunt Bauman had so perspicaciously pointed out, the public space is being colonized by the private: ‘public interest’ is reduced to curiosity about the private lives of public figures, and the art of public life is narrowed to the public display of private affairs and public confessions of private sentiments (the more intimate the better). “‘Public issues’ which resist such reduction become all but incomprehensible (Bauman, Zygmunt – Liquid Modernity).”
There are other implications to this choice however: the fact that our President is not much more than a figurehead, the position of Head of State being largely ceremonial, reflects a conscious decision of the people to move away from a system where one person is vested with sole executive power and, perhaps more importantly in this day and age, media coverage and attention. The development may have been incidental – most parliamentary systems, including ours, were born from the gradual devolution of power from monarchs to members of parliament – but the shaping of a parliament where all are equal represents a democratic choice.
The primus inter pares has unfortunately become mostly bogus, and the Prime Minister’s power of appointment bears a striking resemblance to that accorded to the president in presidential systems. The looming Cabinet reshuffle corroborates this.
In an age where marketing rules, we are more and more attracted to shiny things and glamour: manifestos and ideologies are a thing of the past. Not that a party’s manifesto is made redundant, only we care more for presentation than content. Aesthetic plays a role where it really shouldn’t, eventually giving birth to policies which deprive it of its rightful role in our life and paving the way for function to usurp its rightful place. It’s the perfect irony.
The paper I quoted from earlier points to another study, carried out by Poguntke and Webb, on the presidentialisation of governments, suggests that parliamentary governments “have increasingly taken on stereotypically ‘presidential’ characteristics with respect to power resources, autonomy, and the degree of personalization”. There is a sense that the Opposition might currently be making a case for the former two, but I won’t go into that. Both are guilty of the personalization bit though: the way the Prime Minister talks and the way the Opposition leader addresses him and the way both address issues, is typically presidential in tone. It might not even be a conscious thing, and the targeting and advertising, which arguably set this process in motion in the last couple election campaigns (one of which was accused of copying Sarkozy’s, and another Obama/Biden’s – both presidential campaigns) might have simply been a reaction, a response to the changing attitudes and wishes of the people, the ultimate consumer. As all good advertising campaigns tend to be, after all.
More specifically, the situation of our country might be reflecting the influence which is currently trending. Apart from the growing public fetish with the private realm I mentioned earlier, there is another factor worth considering: political influence from abroad. We might have a Westminster type of government, but the politics which has influenced our daily lives has been French (through that infamous electoral campaign), American (which really influences the whole world) and Berlusconi’s (through his antics). The first two are presidential systems, the last one was a prime minister embodied in a celebrity-style presidential figure. Whereas Italy might be a parliamentary republic on paper, Berlusconi’s reign felt presidential, some would even say imperial.
And so we have adopted this style of doing politics. We had influential political figures before: Mintoff and Eddie both being larger than party figures, but the mood was moved up a notch with the massive billboards portraying a saintly figure with a Mulino Bianco background, and catchy one-word appellations like GonziPN. And whereas before the personality would stand for the party, for what the party meant and what its ideologies promised (most images of Mintoff show him surrounded by his entourage), today they seem to stand in more and more for, well, themselves, as we dig deeper and deeper into their personal lives and creeds and refine our cult of worship and destruction. The leader of the party has become the nation’s vara, and if we are ever to reclaim the public space from the barren private desert “where public confession of private secrets and intimacies is made”, we must shift our attention from the individual to the ideas he embodies.