When Donald Trump won, against all odds, the US presidential election last November, it looked like curtains for the Democratic Party, even though it had actually won the popular vote.
There is probably no other person in the Free World who holds as much power as the President of the United States, who is also the Commander in Chief of the US Armed Forces. He can wage war and order strikes without having to seek the consent of the US Senate and House of Representatives.

Yet his power is not unlimited. The Democratic Party, after months of licking its wounds (and not without some unfinished business) is turning to the future. If any senator dies, Trump may lose his majority in the US Senate. He may also lose his majority in next year’s mid-term election. This is by no means impossible: each of his seemingly endless gaffes has seen his popularity plummet.

If he does lose his senate majority, he may then be impeached, which is what the Democrats really want, or he may simply end up a one-term president.

So the world’s most powerful democracy may find, once again, that the vanquished do have power. That is, after all, what democracy is all about — the minority may find itself to be the majority and today’s government may find itself in opposition.

Comparing Malta to a veritable superpower like the US might not seem to make much sense, but the basic rules of a democracy are the same. In fact, a large and complex democracy, powerful as it may be, is likely to have more checks and balances than a small country such as ours. We have recently seen, after all, that according to the experts in the field, the Prime Minister of Malta has accumulated almost absolute power — such that not even the great POTUS himself could ever dream of having.

Whatever our political inclinations or beliefs, we must realize the importance of reining that unbridled power back in line with the original spirit of the Constitution. Since no prime minister is likely to forfeit the power s/he has accumulated willingly, this task has to be carried out by the opposition.

I can hear the shouts of derision, following Labour’s 40,000-vote victory in the last election. How is a weak and fractious opposition, lost in a leadership campaign which is fast becoming a political quagmire, to stop a steamroller Labour administration?

Archimedes is famous for having said that if he were given a lever, he could raise the world. There is the example of a revitalized US Democratic Party, and so many other examples all over the world.

But the Nationalist Party has one very important trump card which it must play well.

The government has said it intends rewrite the Constitution. To do so, especially to entrench and reformulate certain clauses, the government needs the support of the Opposition, as a two-thirds majority is required in the House of Representatives.

This is the Opposition’s big chance and it must not blow it. It must barter its hard-won power of the vanquished against changes that need to be brought in to make our democracy a real one. There are many examples of such changes one can think of; for instance, a real and effective law that circumscribes the power of incumbency, which seems to have been widely abused of in the last election, particularly in Gozo.

The Opposition should insist that the police commissioner and head of the armed forces — and perhaps the attorney general as well — be approved by at least two-thirds of the House.

Or maybe a way should be sought of stopping the Planning Authority from serving as a supermarket for permits all the way up to the early hours of election day.

All the above are already regulated by laws and practices, but experience has shown those laws to be ineffective. To be fair, past PN administrations also played around with the power of incumbency, as Alfred Sant used to complain.

That is precisely why it might be worthwhile to barter a law strictly enforcing the rules in exchange for support of a constitutional change.