Deborah Schembri, Advocate and legal consultant

It has been aptly said that ‘Those who stand for nothing, fall for anything’. Without a legitimate political ethos, and toppling Joseph Muscat’s government is not encapsulated in that phrase, parties lack their binding force, the strength which comes from solid foundations and compact core values.

The Nationalist Party lost it completely when it started badgering the Prime Minister, making his resignation at all costs their battle cry. It even took the most naïve political decision of the century when it entered into a ‘coalition’ with Marlene Farrugia’s brain child, the Democratic Party, creating much havoc and confusion along the way, letting it ride its fading wave and allowing it to steal two seats in Parliament from it in the process, making their colossal electoral loss even bigger.

It is unfortunate but nonetheless true that a once great party is now in shambles and it has found itself in this predicament mostly because it has lost its soul. It has become a political waif, abandoned by those who once cared for it and abused by those who have tapped into its weakness for their own political reasons.

In all fairness Farrugia, whose political astuteness puts that of Simon Busuttil to shame, has managed to do what Alternattiva Demokratika has been attempting to do for the last 20 years or so without success. PD has managed to grab, not one, but two seats in Parliament in a matter of months. She pitched her thoughts to the leader of the Opposition enticing him to let her join forces with the PN with the sole aim of seizing power from the Prime Minister and he fell for it.

But where does that leave small parties? Is there a future for them, and more importantly, are they needed? I think that although we have seen the rise and fall of many of them along the years, the truth is, there can never be another strong party unless it sees its beginning, at some point in time, as a small party. What has been missing till now is a relatively small party with core values which a good chunk of the population associates with, values they hold in high regard but do not find represented in either of the two parties.

Although I personally believe it shouldn’t be this way, the polarisation of Maltese politics has left us with people pigeon-holing themselves as either conservatives or liberals. With the Nationalist Party having lost its conservative values, as it has been accused of by ex-party stalwart Tonio Fenech, and crystal clear by the evident rift between the parliamentary group on the marriage equality vote, with Edwin Vassallo voting against and Claudio Grech, Carm Mifsud Bonnici and Mario Galea not turning up to vote, there is a good percentage of the population who find themselves unrepresented in Parliament.

We now have a political party who, in order to grab power, forgot what it stood for completely. It presented an electoral manifesto to its conservative base, which had very striking liberal elements. It did so out of political expediency, ignoring the importance to ‘stand for something’, imposing an electoral manifesto not only on its members but even on its parliamentary group with the result of now being seen for what it is… a party without a backbone, conservatives in liberal clothing, traitors to the core values of a party which does not represent its core base.

In this scenario I do see a future for small parties; if for nothing else to represent those who today feel betrayed and unrepresented. I would not be surprised to see a strong, albeit small to start with, splinter party by conservatives within the Nationalist Party. I see them making it to parliament through the front door, on their own merits, not clinging to the Nationalist Party’s back till they cross the threshold. At the end of the day the House of Representatives has to represent the whole spectrum of society, conservatives included.

Claudette Buttigieg, Nationalist MP and Deputy Speaker

Ever since the beginning, our political system was mainly made up of two blocks: the Nationalist Party on one side and the Constitutional, then Labour, parties on the other. The small parties which stemmed in the 1950s and 1960s were actually splits from the big parties.

It is a fact that elections in Malta are becoming more presidential, focusing on the personalities of the party leaders. As elections continue to become more presidential, the two main parties will continue to become stronger in their role of supplying the alternative personalities for the office of prime minister. Small parties will have this added disadvantage: their leaders are not seen as potential prime ministers.

One-issue parties are not political parties. Parties must form policies on a full range of governmental responsibilities as they are aiming for governmental power while pressure groups focus on a single issue. Big parties are very adept at stealing the clothes of a smaller party and single issues can easily be taken over by the main parties. In the local political scene, environmental issues, liberal economics and liberal social values have all been adopted by one or more of the main parties.

The way forward for small parties in Malta is really and truly what happened in the 2017 general elections: clear, pre-electoral alliances in which the smaller parties agree to operate in the shadow of a big party. We cannot deny that in the last election, Partit Demokratiku did relatively well while PN did relatively badly. Small parties seem to be able to live in the shadow of a main party, but seem to damage their partner because the opposing party will run with the narrative that it offers ‘stable’ government while an alliance means ‘chaos’.

In my opinion, for a small party to start making inroads in Malta, it needs to organise itself, first, around what are called second tier elections, namely local councils and European Union elections. This needs to be done for three main reasons. First, these are the elections where voters tend to experiment. Secondly, at a local level the smaller parties are not depending on the big personalities but on true grassroots. Thirdly, small parties at a micro level can afford to have an identity which the big parties cannot steal, mostly the delivery of good local policies and their implementation.

At the level of European Parliament elections small parties are not seen as affecting who will govern Malta. The problem here is, of course, that they need to garner at least 14 per cent of the vote; irrespective of the electoral system we use, the seats to be filled are only six.

In his article ‘For Britain, Political Stability Is a Quaint Relic’, Steven Erlanger writes that, “once considered one of the most politically stable countries in the world, regularly turning out majority governments, Britain is increasingly confusing and unpredictable, to both its allies and itself”. Although many attribute the current instability in Britain to the huge, dividing issue of Brexit, the presence of the smaller political parties is definitely affecting the system.

The classical argument against small parties is that small parties lead to unstable politics. Italy had 63 different governments in 70 years. Countries such as Belgium and Holland take ages to form governments that are then short-lived. Small parties everywhere have to contend with this argument, and in Malta this seems to be a very powerful reason why small parties have only been successful as splits or in the shadow of the main parties.