'Over a century since Sette Giugno some voters remain unrepresented': Momentum
'Smaller parties remain left out of parliament despite casting enough votes to merit two seats'
Over a century since Sette Giugno, smaller parties remain left out of parliament despite casting enough votes to merit two seats, Momentum said on Sunday.
The party recalled the Sette Giugno tragedy in a statement, paying tribute to the six men who died in 1919 for the democratic rights of their compatriots.
107 years on, a new parliament is about to be sworn in that still deliberately excludes the votes of thousands of Maltese citizens, it said.
"The events of June 7, 1919, were a turning point. The deaths of those four men, and of two others who later succumbed to their wounds, forced the hand of the colonial authorities and led to the establishment of self-government in Malta.
"It was a step forward, but an incomplete one: women could not vote, and neither could thousands of men. A significant portion of the population had no voice."
Over a century later, however, smaller parties are still not represented in parliament.
Until the May 30 election, roughly one national quota’s worth of voters went unrepresented with each general election, Momentum said, adding that last Saturday’s result tripled that figure.
"The 4,700 citizens who voted for Momentum, and the 3,994 who voted for ADPD will not have a single representative in the new parliament, despite together casting enough votes to merit two seats under our system of proportional representation.
"What makes this more troubling is the contrast with how the gender corrective mechanism operates. Under that mechanism, seats will be allocated to candidates who received far fewer than 1,000 votes."
While Momentum supports measures to encourage increased representation of women in parliament, it said there was a profound injustice in a system that created a mechanism to correct one democratic deficit while ignoring another entirely.
ADPD's chair, Sandra Gauci, had received a meaningful number of votes, but there is no single mechanism to give her or her voters a voice. Instead, the gender corrective mechanism discriminates against her by explicitly skipping her, the party said.
"Our forebears died for democratic ideals on this day in 1919. Are the present generations prepared to simply accept that nearly 9,000 of their fellow citizens’ votes are ignored and that their rightful representatives are denied a seat at the table?" the party asked.
”The men and women who shaped this country’s democratic history did not fight for a parliament that works for two parties only. The 8,694 people who voted for Momentum and ADPD last Saturday deserve representation," General Secretary Mark Camilleri Gambin added.