George Vella’s term as president ends in less than a month. Yet, from what we hear, the prime minister and the opposition leader seem to be far from agreement.
The new voting rule, requiring a two-thirds parliamentary majority for a new president, was designed to show that, beneath the polemical froth and sharp disagreement of our politics, there is solid ground of consensus about matters of State. Ha!
Instead, the choice of Vella’s successor is increasingly looking like a game of chicken. Will someone swerve from the brink? Or will we have the farce of missing the deadline?
The focus should be on the State and its values. Instead, it is on the politicians and their ability to impose their will.
Before such a spectacle, two alternative choices might seem attractive.
One is a fudged choice: a compromise candidate chosen purely so both leaders can save face and claim vindication.
The other is a nominee with little political experience or even none: someone we can boast is untainted by the very process that selected them. Both leaders could claim victory for their “new way of doing politics”.
These are superficial solutions. They might even make things worse. Suppose the new president’s chief virtue is not any personal quality but simply that she was a compromise. In that case, far from transcending politics and representing the autonomy of the State, her public identity will be that of someone created by the partisan political process.
Another scenario. Imagine the new president’s chief virtue is that he has no political experience and the politicians take credit for that. It means they’ll want our applause for not electing someone like them. But if the politicians themselves do not stand up for the nobility of their calling, they can’t expect us to treat them as morally serious.
In either scenario, the political problems that beset us will quickly resurface. Political problems don’t have ‘non-political’ solutions.
Why raise all this if public discussion can have a very limited effect on the process? Because one way we can help is by showing we won’t applaud false solutions.
We need to avoid focusing on two red herrings.
First is the obsession with any nominee’s ‘conscience’, which is really code for whether they’d sign an abortion law (which Joseph Muscat, on Saturday, said should be on Labour’s agenda).
This is a red herring because all a president can do when faced with a law they don’t like is resign or shut up. The issues of conscience that arose in Vella’s term only took the prominence they did because of government action and inaction.
In one instance, Vella played around with the constitution (by delaying the signing of a bill); the government let him, instead of demanding that he sign without delay, as required, or resign. In the other, the government greatly diluted its intended law; but, here, popular opposition was the real factor.
The last thing we need is a political newbie who’s expected to learn on the job and handle everything the next presidential term might face- Ranier Fsadni
Presidential resignations (let alone threats of one) don’t cause constitutional crises; the constitution anticipates them and provides. Rather, they cause political embarrassment and, at worst, a crisis for the government. It’s politicians that pay the price, not the system.
The second red herring is to think that a new president’s social heart, the capacity for empathy, is the main qualification. Empathy is always welcome but the president is the head of State, not the head of society. It is not charity that the president is elected to represent but the constitution.
That calls for a particular kind of social personality and set of virtues. It calls for sobriety, not emoting; realism, not idealism. As personage, irrespective of any political past, the president must be anchored in the values of the constitution, not leaning towards the latest bandwagon, even if it’s non-partisan.
The president is a personage that reminds us of what constitutes us as a polity – the bedrock of rights, duties and values beneath the surface froth of polemic and democratic disagreement.
In short, the president needs to be that paradox: the personification of the impersonality of the State. A living symbol of the State’s dignity, legitimacy and independence from the politicians that vote her in.
Here’s the second paradox. To be the personification of the autonomy of the State, a president must have had some kind of public life before being appointed. If a virtual unknown is elected, he will be seen to be the creature of the politicians who put him there – living evidence not of the reality of the autonomous State but of its fictitious character.
We have enough State institutions whose autonomy is in serious question. The last thing we need is a political newbie who’s expected to learn on the job and handle everything the next presidential term might face: delicate constitutional reform, political instability (caused by new corruption revelations, police action or inaction, or simply an external economic hit) and highly divisive legislation.
In these scenarios, what we need is someone who can bring to the backstage of politics the moral authority that we expect the president to have in public. Moral authority cannot be commanded by a newbie. It needs to be the political capital the new president already enjoys.
The logic is inescapable. In fraught political times, the choice must fall on someone with a distinguished record of public service.
A record tied to a political party is no impediment if it’s someone known to have the experience to read the backroom and discern when a storm is a real crisis in the making. It must be someone who can sift the facts from the spin and with a proven ability to reflect on conflicting advice.
It has to be someone the public already knows and trusts to be wise, on our behalf, even when we aren’t watching.
Another kind of personage would show the politicians just aren’t serious. For all we know, they might even resent independent moral authority.