Malta’s electoral system is, in many ways, rigged in order to favour Malta’s two major political parties.

The proportional representation with a single transferrable vote (PR-STV) system which is used in Malta is in actual fact designed in order to increase the likelihood of representation of minority voices – yet in Malta, there hasn’t been a small party elected under its own steam since 1962.

In 2017, two Partit Demokratiku members were elected, but only after they contested for the election under the PN’s ballot list.

The country’s electoral system has been tweaked in the past – but its tweaks have been largely all conditional to there being only two political parties in Parliament. 

Examples of this include the mechanism that sees parliamentary seats added to one party or another in order to reflect the proportions of the public vote – which only applies to parties which have been elected, and to the gender quota mechanism which only comes into play if two parties are elected in a general election.

This more recent mechanism, which was first used in a general election in 2022, can see up to 12 parliamentary seats opened up in order to increase the representation of a particular sex. 

This mechanism however only applies if two parties are elected to Parliament: if a third party had to be elected then the mechanism goes unused.  It also ignores third party candidates from the equation when seeing who to grant seats to – effectively meaning that one may end up having candidates elected despite classifying lower than a third party candidate.

This is exactly what happened in the last general election: ADPD’s Sandra Gauci had enough votes to be elected via the gender quota mechanism, but due to the simple fact that the banner she contested under wasn’t red or blue she remained out in the cold.

After the electoral result, ADPD filed a constitutional case arguing that Maltese electoral laws give rise to discrimination against smaller parties.  The party argued that since it had received 4,747 votes across the whole election that was more than the quota needed for one seat and they therefore should have a seat in Parliament.

The First Hall of the Civil Court however rejected all pleas made by ADPD, in a judgment raising several legal points of interest.

In its judgment, the Court noted that no provision of the Constitution could be deemed to be inconsistent with, or in breach of, another article of the same Constitution. The so-called supremacy of the Constitution which affords primacy to the Constitution where any other law conflicts with it, makes no reference to the possibility of inconsistencies between different articles of the same Constitution. Thus, no article of the Constitution could be deemed to be inconsistent with another article thereof.

The party has said that it will be appealing the verdict. 

In the meantime however, Malta appears stuck with its current two-party-favouring electoral system, with the only thing potentially changing that is if enough people in any single district come together to vote for that change.

In this political era where less and less people are feeling represented by the two major parties, that may be a growing possibility – but true democracy is in ensuring that everyone is properly represented. 

Systems that only work if the two major parties are elected, and only back those two major parties, can’t be truly called fully democratic.