Myriam Spiteri Debono was sworn in on Thursday as Malta’s 11th President for the next five years, succeeding George Vella as the country’s head of state.
A 71-year-old notary, Spiteri Debono is the President with the least political credentials in Malta’s republic history: unlike all of her predecessors, she was never elected as an MP – despite standing for elections with the Labour Party between 1981 and 1996 – and her political involvement was limited to serving as Malta’s first woman Speaker of Parliament between 1996 and 1998 during the turbulent Alfred Sant premiership. She has maintained a low profile ever since.
However, that is not to say that Spiteri Debono is a woman who stands for nought. Quite on the contrary, her speeches – including her first speech as President – are hard-hitting and to the point: this is a woman who comes across as being a person of principle, and more so of consistency, who is not afraid of saying what she feels she has to.
But what exactly are those principles? The Malta Independent on Sunday dips into past archives to take Spiteri Debono’s inaugural speech as President on Thursday into context.
Daphne Caruana Galizia and social redemption
The speech which catapulted Spiteri Debono into the public limelight, having edged out of it from 1998 onwards when she ceased to be Speaker, and which probably played a huge part in the Opposition ultimately backing her for the Presidency, was in a commemoration event for Victory Day in 2021.
Invited to address the government’s official celebration of the public holiday, Spiteri Debono chose to speak about the assassinated Daphne Caruana Galizia – a near-enough unprecedented thing for somebody associated with the Labour Party to do.
“Raymond Caruana and Karin Grech were the victims of the prevailing situations in the times when their blood was spilled and their lives cut short. The killing of Daphne Caruana Galizia was different – it was a brutal and ghoulish murder. Investigations have so far shown that she was the intended victim of the killing. They killed her to shut her up,” Spiteri Debono said in that speech.
“This was an execution, intimately connected with the investigations she conducted in the exercise of her profession as a journalist. It would help everyone to strengthen the respect and the appreciation we should have for all those who work in investigative journalism and who spread the news. Let us remember that journalism is the fourth pillar of democracy.”
“We must redeem ourselves anew. We need to come together, as we have in the past, to make necessary changes, some of which we've already started to make,” she said.
“But to do this, we cannot get caught up in gossip and name-calling, in petty quips to score political points and pyrrhic victories without substance on a partisan level, which often only serve to sow division among people.”
Such was the power of her speech that the government’s Department of Information did not disseminate it publicly. Till this day, it has never been published in full online by the government.
Yet, in her speech on Thursday, Spiteri Debono again spoke about Caruana Galizia’s assassination and about the redemption that the country needs to go through.
In no uncertain terms, she said: “The wound generated by the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia is still wide open and bleeding. Healing is a must in order that this horrendous episode be wound up. Once and for all. Otherwise, we cannot move forward. Otherwise, its fallout shall continue to haunt us.”
“Although a considerable period of time has elapsed since the deaths of Karin Grech and Raymond Caruana, these two episodes never had closure, and, as a consequence of this, their wounds are still seeping. Let us make sure that this does not happen again.”
This is not to say that her predecessor George Vella did not harbour similar thoughts: he had visited the site where Caruana Galizia was murdered in September 2021, saying that the act was also part of fulfilling the recommendations of the public inquiry into Caruana Galizia’s death by reconciling with the journalist’s family so to start a process of healing from what the country went through.
However, Spiteri Debono’s statement on Thursday that the wound left by Caruana Galizia’s brutal killing “is still wide open and bleeding” is in itself a critique on how the government has acted, even after a public inquiry chastised it back in 2021.
It remains an uncomfortable topic – so much so that state broadcaster TVM’s presenter giving his round-up of the new President’s speech immediately after it aired failed to give it any mention – yet Spiteri Debono refused to shy away from it: quite the contrary, she tackled it head on, much like she did three years ago.
One vote for all, representation for all
Spiteri Debono was the first President to be appointed after it became mandatory for the government and opposition to agree on who should take up the role of head of state. While her three predecessors all had unanimous parliamentary backing – even though it wasn’t necessary – there were worries that given that a two-thirds majority was now mandatory, the appointment process may be subject to the uncertainty and messier nuances of cross-party politics.
In the end, an agreement was reached on George Vella’s successor in good time, and Spiteri Debono praised this in the first part of her inaugural speech.
“The two-thirds requirement should not be viewed as a hindrance. Those who lament the fact that the Constitution lays down a majority of two-thirds of the Members of the House for certain matters, are mistaken,” she said.
She used this point however as a way to move into a subject which is clearly quite close to her heart: that of making sure that every single Maltese voter is represented in the country’s corridors of power.
Spiteri Debono noted that the “two-thirds requirement is a tool fostering consensus building, a tool which helps to positively develop the way of doing politics, promotes dialogue, persuasion, and compromise based on an appreciation of the preoccupations of all sides involved in the process” – irrespective of whether the House is made up of two political parties or more.
Here however she noted that having a Parliament made up of more than two parties would require amendments to the electoral system “since, at present, the smaller political formations are at a disadvantage when it comes to the election of members to the House of Representatives.”
“Amendments in this regard would bring our electoral system more into line with the basic democratic principle of ‘one person, one vote, one value’,” she said.
This is a principle which Spiteri Debono harboured and spoke about way back when she was Speaker, and it featured in her Sette Giugno speeches in both 1997 and 1998.
She explained in 1997 how Parliament is the product of political ideas; ideas which may times give room for different interpretations, ideas which are dynamic enough in nature to create discussion, which can mean different things or have different meanings in different times for different groups of people.
She said that in a modern democracy “weight must be given to the public’s opinion: to the rights, and aspirations of the individual as a citizen and to how society’s essential values must be strengthened with new structures that are dedicated for Parliament, apart from its traditional functions, to be always more representatives of the society that elects it.”
“We would be doing a disservice to the memory and sacrifices of the martyrs and heroes of the journey of our land, and to our duty towards the future generations of Maltese if we who are trusted to lead in the present do not ensure that we perfect, as much as humanly possible, the defects which interfere with every citizen’s vote having more concrete and direct representation in Parliament,” she had said.
It’s a topic she spoke about again, in more direct terms, on the same occasion in the following year.
“The need for us to find ways to perfect, as much as humanly possible, defects which still interfere with a citizen’s vote have more concrete and direct representation in Parliament exists and is being felt,” she said in 1998, effectively reiterating what she had said the previous year.
“Our country’s electoral system so far is still far from reflecting the basic democratic principles that every person has one vote, with one representative value,” she said.
Spiteri Debono’s remarks back in 1997 and 1998 and this week hold water: the country’s electoral system still heavily favours the two major parties, something clearly seen in the implementation of the gender corrective mechanism in the last general election.
This mechanism on the one hand aimed to increase representation by allowing for the election of more women into Parliament, but at the same time blocked any third party candidates from taking advantage of it.
As of 2022’s general election, 9,308 people who voted for parties which were not the PL or PN are unrepresented in Parliament.
Democratic maturity and good governance
The concept of democracy takes various forms in the Maltese political sphere. Many times, the two sides of the argument manage to come to an agreement immediately. Sometimes people need to take to the streets for positions to be improved. Other times, the government says that it has the majority, so it can decide.
While serving as Speaker, Spiteri Debono spoke about the need for what she termed ‘democratic maturity’ in how subjects are tackled, and has long said that it is a basic principle required for the good of the people to be the true priority.
“It seems like we have the necessary democratic maturity so that together we can regulate how we can treat and discuss those subjects where it’s not easy for us to agree about,” she said in her 1997 Sette Giugno speech, as she illustrated what this term means.
“Cooperation between government and opposition in the regulation of Parliament’s work is a democratic necessity; a practice which goes beyond democracy in the rigid sense of majority and minority which merely aims to satisfy the majority, but which centres on the acceptance of the basic principle that the people are sovereign, that the good of the people comes first with the flexibility that this principle brings when it comes to its practical implementation,” she added.
A year later, however, in her speech on the same day, her told was markedly different.
“I reiterate from last year’s speech that it is not desirable that Parliament is led by the imposition of the majority, and the interference of the minority. With disappointment I say that this past year showed that we do not have the necessary democratic maturity to regulate and discuss those subjects where it’s not easy for us to reach an agreement,” she said.
“For the ultimate benefit of the people we need to find the road which will lead us to accepting diverse positions, sometimes even opposite ones, without breaking the tranquillity and equilibrium which is necessary for our country to move forward without any extra blips which we create ourselves,” she added.
These remarks were likely prompted by the turbulent times in Parliament, as Alfred Sant’s government was voted down in that very same summer, with former PL leader Dom Mintoff voting against the government and leading to the calling of a snap election.
The correlation with political maturity and the public good of course still holds water, but in this year’s speech, now as President, Spiteri Debono brought to the fore a topic which impinges on both: financial greed.
“The relentless pursuit of riches, more often than not, translates itself into various forms of corruption; the pursuer becomes indifferent to the suffering he may directly or indirectly cause others. It is worse than substance addiction, which, in the perception of the majority of people, is the worst addiction one can suffer from. The drug addict, mainly, harms himself; greed harms the whole of society,” she said in what can be perceived as a scathing indictment of much of the modern day corridors of power – both the public ones and private ones.
“The concept of good governance is a concept which should never be sidelined. It forms part of the widening and the evolution of democracy. We have already started working on this. I, myself, am the product of one of the reforms implementing broadening of governance. Some of these reforms were implemented following recommendations from outside our shores,” she added.
Good governance is inescapably tied with democratic maturity, and those two points are inescapably tied with the common good for the common people.
“Persons involved in politics, all together, must seriously see that they do not cause apathy towards politics in the populace. It appears that more and more people feel that politics jars. They are indifferent where politics are concerned. If this situation is not seriously tackled, our country shall suffer from a shortage of future leaders from the youthful segment of society,” she said.
That’s a warning to the country’s political class, if ever there was one.