Dreadful democracy

Malta once had an architect politician who was touted as a professor of democracy at a time when the word was most often mentioned because the absence of what it denotes was most keenly felt. Today we have a doctor of medicine who displays ambitions to occupy his chair.

Amazingly Louis Deguara (Fair Representation And Governability, May 13) delights in the recent victory of Britain's Labour Party, lauding the virtues of that island nation's iniquitous first-past-the-post electoral system in a long series of illogical conclusions worthy of a true professor of democracy.

He claims that the British system produces strong governments which, in turn, give Britain its strong economy. Since when? Has Britain always had an enviable economic situation? It has had its absurd electoral system since the days of George III and before. Undemocratic electoral systems do not guarantee economic success. Ask the Burmese. Quiz the Zimbabweans.

Does he believe that the Maltese would welcome a government that could take their country to war on the strength of a majority of just 47 per cent of the vote and a sack full of fibs? Would they stomach today's British government ruling untrammelled with just 37 per cent of the vote? In 1919 the Parliament in Westminster missed adopting a proportional representation system by just six votes.

Three years later it introduced this, the leading edge system then available, in Malta and in Ireland. Our PN denounced it as a colonial government's ploy to divide and rule. The British are still stuck with their threadbare antique.

Ireland, with an electoral system identical in every particular to Malta's, is not on the road to economic perdition regardless of the fact that multiparty governments have been the rule since 1921. They may not have the lunatic fringe of Maltese neo-fascists feared by Dr Deguara in their Parliament, they have Sinn Fein, the political wing of the world's most violent pseudo-Catholics, the IRA. There is no sign of political collapse yet.

He quotes Israel and Italy as examples of over-fair systems which do not work. Funny about Israel, it appears to do well enough, coalition after coalition, regardless of the fact that it has been at war since 1947. Italy, for all its political ups and downs, is still the sixth largest economy in the world against all odds. Perhaps the democratic unfairness there was that the Christian Democrats were in every government for 50 years after WWII. Not bad for an unstable system.

The Deguarean democratic and economic disaster in the Netherlands gives it a GDP equal to those of all the 10 new EU member states' rolled into one along with eternal coalition governments. Dr Deguara would have us avoid all the pain of such an appalling situation. So far it has been by the artificial maintenance of a 16.6 per cent electoral threshold which would decimate political parties across the continent if applied there. In the Netherlands it is 0.65 per cent.

His interpretation of Maltese pre- and post-independence political history omits an important figure: Dom Mintoff, whose role in eliminating Maltese political diversity cannot be underestimated. Mr Mintoff revived the PN phoenix from its ashes by necessitating a coalition of his opponents of every shape and size to counter his abrasiveness.

Since then, Dr Deguara's party has considered this Mintoff-made amalgam its own private property to use and abuse at will. Its use-by date has elapsed.

The "inculcation" into "the Maltese psyche" of a "preference for strong governments" was not the result of a pre-independence hung Parliament but of the totalising, mutually exclusive, all-or-nothing desperation of Maltese politics since. We have not had strong governments. We have had single party governments produced by fear of damnation and other political frauds in Chicken Licken elections. There is a difference.

By Dr Deguara's definition, the 1981 Labour government which ruled through a five-year electoral campaign contested every inch of the way through blood and fire by the Nationalist Party was a strong government ensuring economic growth. It was the closest thing we have had to a fascist dictatorship, and also the closest to the minority single party governments inflicted on Britain, the empty cradle of democracy. Has he conveniently forgotten the PN hoo-haa about the 10-year wage freeze?

The Manichean conflict engendered by the Maltese two-party system has cost us an inestimable price in lives lost, lives ruined and years of possible development gains squandered in partisan squabbling. It has given us a structural democratic deficit and an unbearable debt burden through the near total absence of political accountability for electoral splurging. Today we are paying the price.

Only a politically illiterate could speak of any Parliament at the mercy of a single member only if a third party is elected to Parliament. Any Maltese Parliament dependent on the slender advantage of a single seat is theoretically subject to the blackmail of any member of that majority.

Only the terminally mono-minded can see the theoretical threat only in a single member of a third party. We all remember the crisis of the last Labour government. It too was a single-party government, supposedly strong and presumably economically proficient by Dr Deguara's definition. There were no dastardly Greens around at the time.

The major difference between Mr Mintoff's performance and that of a Green member would be the minor matter of the contrast between the final flick of the tail by an octogenarian political maverick and the first foothold of a politically young presence that is determined to make good its gains. Only the politically gaga can fail to spot the difference.

If Dr Deguara will not take the Greens' 15 year track record for consistency and responsibility as a guarantee of their future performance, he has only to recall the consequences to Mr Mintoff of his final parliamentary exploit. The Greens want to grow and would have no interest in determining their early extinction at the next following election brought on before its time through some unacceptable behaviour on entering Parliament. That is simply commonsense politics, something Dr Deguara refuses to understand.

In fact, the Greens would be under constant threat from any coalition ally who would have every interest in pushing them to the wire at every opportunity by presenting them with the dilemma of accepting the unacceptable or signing their political doom by resigning from the government. It is not the tiny minority that threatens stability but the seek-and-destroy ethos of political parties allergic to anything like continental-style consensus politics.

It takes immense cheek for any Maltese politician to speak of the unfairness of disproportionate influence by a tiny minority elected by proportional representation. Malta has a single vote in the General Assembly of the United Nations. So does India with 2000 times the population of Malta. Dr Deguara, coming from an island state the size of any medium sized town anywhere in Europe, sits on the EU's Council of Ministers. How does he not shrivel in shame when speaking of the menace of tiny minorities?

Our rate of representation in the European Parliament applied to Germany would produce 1,000 German MEPs. Does he realise that his articles can be read around the world through the internet? How is he ever going to defend Malta's case for a sixth seat in that Parliament following his denouncement of the intolerable fairness of strict proportionality? In every international institution Malta is disproportionately overrepresented. In Malta, Dr Deguara dreads fair representation for his political adversaries.

The PN is known for its double standards but in the matter of scaremongering about governability and tiny minorities it exceeds every other exploit it has ever perpetrated in the field.

Posing as a strong government, it has acclimatised to the blackmail of every lobby it perceives to be a threat to its hold on virtual impotence.

A Blue-Green or a Red-Green coalition would be part of Malta's immediate future if our adversaries were not so bereft of the basics of consensus politics.

It would not give Greens immense power but disproportionate responsibility to keep the country on an even keel, to avoid complete reversals of policy at every alternation of government, to create the conditions for a framing of a political common ground, to end the unpredictable electoral ambulance chasing which our adversaries are obliged to perform regardless of ideological contradictions, economic cost and the denial of a complete articulation of the real wealth of diversity which our population truly does possess in this small space.

It will not happen soon regardless of the Greens' entry into Parliament. The current moves on electoral reform appear set to divert the future once more, if not to postpone it altogether.

Deguara-style fear of the future has delayed the natural progression of Maltese politics long enough.

Yet the days of political obscurantism are numbered. We have every reason to dread an extension of our past in the form of yet another single-party government of whichever colour much more than an authentic change expressing the wishes of the people.

There are already enough of us who think so to bring this about regardless of thresholds, hurdles, flaming hoops and moving goalposts. Still, Dr Deguara's dread of democracy will ensure we will have yet another single-party government, Greens or no Greens in Parliament.

Dr Vassallo is chairman of Alternattiva Demokratika - The Green Party.

www.alternattiva.org.mt