Plans to increase the number of women MPs by adding seats to Malta’s parliament are “degrading and discriminatory” and should be replaced with a system of gender-balanced lists of candidates, ADPD said on Saturday.
The political party said that while addressing gender imbalance within parliament was long overdue, the system being debated by lawmakers was inadequate.
MPs are currently discussing a gender balancing mechanism which would see seats added to parliament to ensure gender balance. The mechanism would kick in if one gender obtains fewer than 40 per cent of seats and would allow up to 12 additional seats to be added to rebalance parliament.
The proposal, first floated in 2019, is backed by the Nationalist Party opposition, which has however proposed amendments to existing proposals.
The plans have however been criticised by ADPD, which has said the mechanism tinkers with the existing setup without fixing core issues.
Just seven of Malta's 67 MPs are women, making Malta's parliament the second-least gender-balanced parliament across all EU member states. Only Hungary does worse.
Speaking on Saturday, ADPD spokesperson Sandra Gauci said the proposal being debated was degrading as it would lead to women candidates being declared MPs “as a consolation prize” despite them having only obtained a fraction of the votes required to be elected.
ADPD members outside parliament on Saturday. Photo: ADPD“Female candidates should have a proper opportunity to compete for a seat in Parliament at par with male candidates,” Gauci said.
ADPD chairperson Carmel Cacopardo said the proposal was also discriminatory as it would only apply “when candidates from two parties make it to parliament”.
Cacopardo acknowledged that the PN amendments proposed abolishing this provision, but said this would “not achieve much” unless the system was overhauled.
Instead of the gender rebalancing mechanism, ADPD is calling for a system based on gender-balanced party lists.
Gender-balanced lists would require political parties to field a roughly equal number of electoral candidates from either gender, encouraging more equal political participation by presenting voters with a vaster selection of candidates from the under-represented gender.
“This would also do away with the need to correct results to adjust for proportionality, as elections so organised give us results which are strictly proportional too,” ADPD argued.
It said that a government-appointed commission tasked with looking into gender equality proposals for parliament had discarded its proposals without discussing them further.
Just 15 per cent of candidates during Malta's last general election were women, according to a 2019 report by the European Institute for Gender Equality.