In everyday chitchat, many have become used to dismissing Parliament as an irrelevance... as a talkshop, where decisions already taken behind closed doors elsewhere, simply get rubberstamped. At one time, Oliver Friggieri with a novel of his had launched the expression that flowers do not grow in Parliament - because it was the place which housed verbal battles, likely all false and contaminated by personal interests and/or the urge for power. It was a powerful metaphor which, despite the applause that greeted it, was too much of a parody and fundamentally incorrect.

            For no matter what may be said, Parliament remains the country's leading institution... overriding the cabinet of ministers, the Presidency, the courts as well. No doubt, it can fall under the control of a party, a clique, a Prime Minister, hidden interests. When it happens, the reason would be that the citizens, in their role as voters, have decided that's what they wanted. Every time, in all freedom, they must choose representstives to decide on their behalf for a given period. That remains the basic reality. The state is then run according to decisions taken by Parliament, which is what makes it the leading national institution.

            No matter how it gets won or lost, a majority in Parliament points to who should be leading the country, or whether new elections need to be held.         

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COUNTING OF VOTES

            There are people I know who consider as their most memorable political experience, the time they spend in the halls where votes get counted and where they stay from beginning to end of the process being played out there.  They consider this period as a dramatic interval during which the future of the country for the coming next five years is being decided, as well as the destiny of so many candidates. On top of this, they like the aura of fervour (if that is the right word) which prevails among the individuals crowding the halls to observe the counting.

            I never shared their attitude. For me, the future of the country and of the candidates have already been sealed by the time the counting starts: it happened the previous day when people voted. The counting of votes had best take just one moment, insulated from all drama and theatrics. The technology exists today for this to be done. But in the past, whenever I suggested that we should apply it, I found minimal support for such a "bizarre" perspective.

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QUOTAS

            No matter what gets argued, quotas for female candidates in general elections remain necessary. People aligned with US President Trump's way of seeing things consider such an arrangement as discriminatory. From a "mathematical" perspective, it is.  On social grounds - which is what should be of concern to democrats - it is not. No matter how "woke" this policy seems (according to Trump and friends), it is impossible to deny that significant inequalities do exist when women enter to compete in political contests.  People who deny this, prefer to ignore known facts - just as in similar situations, racial imbalances are ignored, as is happening again today in the US

            It is true that the quota system we now run could have been designed better because it resulted in a disproportionate increase in the overall number of MPs. But that was the agreed arrangement and should be followed till by agreement, some better model for quotas is discovered.