The post-referendum general election

You will never win with a person like Alfred Mifsud. You come up with an argument and he has another one ready, you destroy a position and he sets up another. I refer to his arguments in The Times yesterday where he replied to previous arguments by Lino Spiteri and Joe Pirotta that, based on the normal turnout in national elections, the realistic percentage figure of the yes vote in the March 8 referendum would be 50.57 per cent. Of course, he did not like these conclusions because they destroy the arguments he and the MLP have been making over the past few days that this popular mandate does not exist.

At least Mr Mifsud, going by what he said in a recent discussion on Smash TV, does not subscribe to his leader's bizarre conclusion splashed in the MLP media that "partnership" has won.

But his arguments are still bad and his concept of democracy thwarted.

Let me start with the second. In 1998 the Nationalist Party came into power with the mandate to negotiate EU membership and to present the results to the people for their approval. The referendum held on March 8 was the democratic fulfilment of that promise. It gave the Maltese people the chance to exercise their sovereignty, to have their say, by voting on their future in a free election.

The people voted and they decided yes by an overwhelming majority.

The figure of 53 per cent plus is the relevant figure for any democrat not any speculative adjustments analysts, commentators or party officials may care to make and it is a mistake to go on the defensive on this and play the MLP's game by quibbling over percentages.

The recognised principle everywhere is that democratic elections are decided by the legitimate votes cast, not by speculation. Once this principle is undermined everything is up for grabs and we risk anarchy. So one expects everybody who would call him or herself a democrat to uphold it with his or her life.

Mr Mifsud's four basic reasons for declaring the referendum undemocratic are subjective and invalid. The electorate was bombarded by both sides, yes and no, including the MLP, which used its considerable media machinery, and the state media too, for its sustained campaign of downright untruths, distortions and half-truths with the object not to make its case against rationally but to confuse and scaremonger. That, Mr Mifsud, is distorting democracy!

Note how the "partnership" issue taken out of the hat for the referendum was quickly returned to it once the referendum was past. I am surprised how he can write about serene environments. Unfortunately, politics will never be serene in Malta, and the MLP leadership made sure the environment of the referendum would not be serene by politicising it from the outset, sensing that its own political survival was at stake.

Malta was not technically in the throes of any election campaign, the MLP leadership turned it into one to suit its purposes in the hope it would constrain the government to hold an election before any referendum, knowing full well that such a course of action would provoke an angry reaction by people like myself who have insisted from the start that the EU issue was one of citizens not of parties. I would have been the first one to express my sense of betrayal had the government behaved as Mr Mifsud wanted it to.

Finally, the present government already had the constitutional mandate to exercise the people's choice after the 1998 general election, but it rightly felt that something else was required, a democratic mandate; that is, the referendum, which is recognised everywhere as the direct expression of the people's will. But the MLP leadership today does not believe in referenda or the people's will any more than it believed in it in 1981.

Now, for what the issue is worth, for his argument that Mr Spiteri's and Prof. Pirotta's arguments are bad. I agree with Mr Mifsud that, thanks to the MLP, there was nothing normal about this referendum, but the rest of his logic would not pass muster in a sixth form course. "Once Labour had pre-declared it would include in its fold those who abstained, it forced those who would 'normally' stay out of the contest to form part of it," is his reasoning.

I am flabbergasted. Mr Mifsud assumes that everybody wants to play with Labour's rules and to subscribe to Labour's logic. One thing he, along with other MLP commentators, choose to overlook when they make their claims about those who did not vote is the fact that close to the referendum a number of polls consistently showed that the number of undecided was very high, as high as 20 per cent in some polls.

Undoubtedly, a number of these later made up their mind and voted one way or the other, but who is to tell Mr Mifsud that a substantial part of the nine per cent who did not vote (apart from the dead, the sick, those abroad and those who were just sick of it all and could not care less), were not still genuinely confused and undecided and abstained for that reason? Why does he not adjust his scale to cater for these also once he is venturing into dangerous speculations on the basis of what is "likely" or not. And why does he not, while he is at it, check the referendum outcome against the contemporaneous results of the local elections, which the MLP fought like a general election also under the banner of "partnership", and adjust his scale on that also?

No wonder the MLP quickly abandoned that banner!

In the Smash discussion I referred to earlier, Mr Mifsud declared his party's tactics for the April general election. Let us forget about the referendum now, he said, that is behind us, and concentrate on "local" issues (as though the EU issue belongs to another stratosphere). The people have decided now, not on the basis of their declared votes in the referendum, but on the basis of Dr Sant's and Mr Mifsud's speculations about those who did not vote.

And he has the impertinence to write about the "betrayal of democracy"! This man who is not even ready to play by its most elementary rules.

As things stand, the next general election is more about joining the EU than it ever could have been. The Maltese electorate must now decide whether it wants to turn this country into the laughing stock of the democratic world or express its maturity by confirming the yes result in the referendum.