Stability or stagnation?

Having commented on the choice of President before the choice was officially made I would have been happy to let sleeping dogs lie on the issue for a while. However Dr Fenech Adami's interview with The Times on Wednesday gives nobody a break.

The new President's stance with regard to the lack of dialogue between him and the various Leaders of the Opposition during his terms as Prime Minister is a matter of serious concern. He seems to lack any insight to the problem. He appears detached from an obvious reality.

Worse still, he appears to be determined to perpetuate the situation he talks about changing. He thinks that "our system of confrontational politics is positive in the sense that it provides stability in the country."

Speaking of Pax Romana, Tacitus, himself a Roman, admits that "where they make a desert they describe as peaceful." Dr Fenech Adami is credited with having ended an era of political violence the like of which our country had never seen before.

It took great courage and an unfailing optimism to be the Leader of the Opposition at a time that produced more Maltese desaparecidos than the more famous Argentinians in proportion to population. It may have taken more to live one's life in danger of becoming a desaparecido.

The merit of course is not his alone but goes also to the majority of voters in the 1987 election who ended the country's bloody trauma. History and the people demanded and brought about the change. It is time that Dr Fenech Adami's debt to the people also be acknowledged.

Despite the barely concealed contempt of many politicians for their own supporters, the Maltese electorate has infallibly sensed the historical moment for change. The majority had already spoken out in 1981. We are not as daft as we are sometimes made out to be.

With the end of political war we entered a political desert and pretended that the absence of war was peace. It was zero-sum politics. It was the negation of half the country's energies. It was a ruinous wastage of economic and human resources. It was a loss of opportunities we will regret forever.

We have had a stable government for as long as anyone can remember. We had a stable government when the country was in the throes of political violence. We have had an insufferable stability all the years we felt good while the economy lost the race. Stability is not an absolute value. It has a negative value if it turns out to be stagnation, mental, political, economic, social and cultural.

Dr Fenech Adami wants to perpetuate the lie produced by a broadcasting system that gives virtually no access to the remarkable wealth of minorities with which this society is blessed. For 15 years as the head of government he never lifted a finger to change this. He spoke of pluralism but it was the minimum pluralism that perpetuates his precious stability and a permanent confrontation.

His defence of stability is a perpetuation of the non-option given to voters to vote for the bad to avoid rewarding the worse. It is essentially a betrayal of his function of defender of the Constitution.

Nowhere in the Constitution is it laid down that Malta shall suffer minimal pluralism until the end of time. The President has no business declaring his penchant for stagnation. Dr Fenech Adami appears to forget that he no longer addresses a fawning crowd of partisans but should be speaking for the whole country.

The present insufferable situation is sustained by a system of structural violence which produces massive coerced support for two parties bound to a constant fight to the death out of institutional necessity. It is pathetic to read Dr Fenech Adami's regret about excessive confrontation. It is either blatant hypocrisy or damning evidence that he is out of touch with reality.

The system he defends in the name of stability absorbs all the country's energies in a never-ending, permanent and all-encompassing confrontation. He is one of its architects. He has been and now declares that he remains half of our problem. How can he also try to be the solution?

Thirty years of political stagnation have produced a situation where both the other political parties fear change more than anything else. The palpable lack of ideological coherence of both the other parties has been produced by their unnatural attempt to extend from the right to left of centre and from right of centre to the left. Today it exposes them to the danger of sudden implosion if they were to be exposed to the challenge of something real. Neither can stomach the idea of an even playing field in politics because it would mean the end of winner-takes-all politics as they love it.

Political dynamism terrifies our dinosaurs. The idea of kaleidoscopic alliances forming according to issues rather than in terms of petrified party loyalty scares them witless. The last thing that they want is a fully articulated expression of the will of the people. They have no idea how to do politics, only how to manipulate the media and sit in the manger to prevent change.

The political parties in Parliament find consensus only in perpetuating the structures that make confrontation necessary and eternal. Neither can imagine forming a government alliance. Neither dares to mention consensus politics. It means the surrender of absolute power or of hoping for it.

At this time the country faces the prospect at the next election of returning a party that will extend its reign to 25 years or one that will be no change at all: the MLP aspires to being yet another one-party government. The President wants to bind the country to this poor choice in the name of stability.

What the country needs is release from the stranglehold of stability and stagnation. It needs to release the political dynamism already evident in civil society. Only a greater diversity, the fragmentation that petrifies our political megaliths, can allow us common ownership of our country's institutions. Only a wider, better articulated debate can end sterile confrontation.

To create a common ground, to safeguard the constitution and to make it a widely internalised value among its citizens we need to give voice to the wealth of diversity within our society and to end the monopolisation of the country's institutions by a single political party, any single political party.

Dr Fenech Adami still does not get it. He seems unable to grasp the fact that his elevation to the Presidency has shocked many of those who sincerely supported him as Prime Minister. He has no idea how his words hurt those who are neither Nationalist nor Labourite and have experienced the structural violence of his beloved system for 30 years.

He still does not know how to be our President also. We are Alternattiva Demokratika. We propose an alternative system of democratic expression, far better than the basic basic of majority rule. We can start an era of respect for minorities based on an inviolable common ground. It would be more in keeping with the spirit of the Constitution which Dr Fenech Adami has solemnly sworn to defend.

Dr Vassallo is chairman of Alternattiva Demokratika - The Green Party

www.alternattiva.org.mt
hcvassallo@alternattiva.org.mt