Trust the authorities to use a round anniversary to rewrite history in a way that justifies them and their path. The 50th anniversary of abolishing the monarchy was bound to be used as an opportunity to paint the past as an inexorable climb upwards and onwards to the inevitably justified and glorious present. Fine. Round political anniversaries are the bread and butter of an over-spending iron curtain propaganda machine. It’s something we have to live with. And pay for.
In the meantime, we can also use the anniversary to consider the present. Where is our republic? What challenges should we address?
It’s been a dozen years since the Labour Party solemnly announced it wanted to debate reforms in the constitutional design of the republic. Imagine that. We spent more than a fifth of the republic’s history waiting for Labour to discuss how to improve it. How does a promise for a constitutional debate get forgotten over time without any explanation or formal announcement that the idea has been scrapped? The last known official excuse for the delay in summoning a constitutional convention is that it is inadvisable to have gatherings because of COVID.
There are good reasons to put on a mask if we have to and sit down to talk. Entire branches of Malta’s governance have withered into redundancy. Consider parliament, which is little more than a ceremonial expense that legitimises the government’s power. Parliament is the prime minister’s political gym, a hall of mirrors designed to reflect his flexed muscles inwardly and project them outwardly.
There is little scrutiny of government business, and, though there is a production line of legislative rubber-stamping, parliament does not write any laws. It is a bottling plant for the unmediated syrup-making of the executive branch.
Another redundant branch of government is local councils. Unable to raise their taxes, they depend on the shrivelling generosity of the prime minister, who is, in principle, reluctant to share power. Instead of committees of citizen leaders accountable to the neighbours who vote them in, councillors have been reduced to spectators. At the same time, ministers run their constituencies like casual mayors, diverting national budgets to the towns where their voters live.
This reminds us why we need to examine our electoral system closely. It relies on intra-party competition between colleagues of the same party vying for a restricted pool of votes. Voters are confronted with a competition of generosity, favours, personal promises, free food and drink and undignified politicking, which has precious little to do with politics. Politics – ostensibly the business of running a community in its interest – instead becomes a game of ‘what’s in it for me’.
Entire branches of Malta’s governance have withered into redundancy
There are problems on the macro level as well. While national parties debate highfalutin policy matters contrasting their positions in Manichaean terms, they are nearly identical in the background. They are tribes organised as poorly funded businesses that rely on a small cartel of donors for survival.
Though there is nothing like the transparency we need to prove it, anecdotally at least, we have good reason to suspect that most donors fund both main parties, ensuring that, despite the differences expressed outwardly by political parties, inwardly, both will do their donors’ bidding.
That is, perhaps, our biggest democratic challenge: the fact that we are lulled into the false security given to us by periodic elections, high voter turnout and a combative political scene, convincing us that we live in a functioning democracy with options and plurality. Do we?
Power is never what it seems but that does not mean you can’t do things that could reduce the institutionalised deception. That, too, is what it means to live in a republic: to be governed by laws greater than even the most powerful, the wealthiest and the best-armed clans. The trick is to have the right laws and to keep improving them.
That is why our constitutional design needs to be reviewed. We need to rethink how our political parties are funded, how our votes are cast and counted and how the parliamentarians we elect (whether they become ministers or not) are productively working to write our laws and keep our government in check.
This is not about indulging in institutional esoterica, though if you’ve read this far and are still with me, you must admit you’re into that stuff. It is about sorting out the workshop’s workbench and tool rack, where the country’s problems are fixed. Our institutional mess weakens our country.
Consider, for example, our apparent inability to fight corruption. There are many reasons why that is the case but at least one of them is that most MPs are financially dependent on the government they’re supposed to be watching. Then there’s the fact that policing corruption is a competence divided between half a dozen institutions, none of which alone can make a difference.
If we’re so vulnerable to corruption, we are generally exposed to its biggest wielder: organised crime. While heads of institutions, particularly the most significant head of them all, the prime minister, deny the existence of organised crime, brave police officers nab a single shipment of cocaine worth the cost of building a new hospital. The organisation capable of funding and redistributing such a shipment can mobilise more financial muscle than almost any legitimate business organisation in the country.
They’re so powerful that the republic, which should be the people’s business, becomes theirs instead. After all, they cannot take the tens of millions in profits they make from selling that cocaine to the high street bank branch. Instead, they put it through a conversion process, laundering it.
Yes, it’s quite a leap I’m asking you to make between these stepping stones. Jump from how your MP is voted in, how their party is funded, how they’ll grant inexplicable building permits to their donors and how their donors got their millions in the first place. Was it drugs?
We don’t often make these connections as we plan a route to the office in the morning.
We don’t frequently think about our republic except on one of its big birthdays. It would help if you thought more about the republic.
It’s your business.