Almost there

Twelve months ago or nearly Alternattiva Demokratika set the ball rolling on tripartite talks on electoral reform. Both our adversaries agreed to the talks and then did nothing for months on end.

It was only in recent weeks that talks started in earnest. One day the whole story will be told. At this time I am in honour bound not to tell what our experience has been. It also makes sense to allow our adversaries room for manoeuvre. All horse-trading is done in this way.

I would prefer a public auction in full view of the curious and the accidental passersby. What is being negotiated does not concern just the leadership of the three political parties involved but the whole country, tired as it may be of our endless haggling over everything.

It is fundamental to the Maltese Greens' perspective that political parties must withdraw, rein in their totalising thrust, to allow ordinary citizens ownership of their country's institutions. There is nothing more fundamental than the mechanics of our democracy.

Sadly the matter will be determined by political parties formed in a bi-partisan political landscape which no longer reflects the needs and aspirations of a truly pluralistic society. Malta has changed. Our adversaries have not.

The crisis brought about by the Electoral Commission's report on electoral districts has precipitated events. It proposes to reverse the situation that has favoured the Nationalist Party in the past several elections. It has jolted the government party out of its lethargy on the issue. The Prime Minister has now proposed a compromise solution resuscitating the 1995 Gonzi Commission.

It all sounds miraculous. Our adversaries have sat on their hands for a decade and now there are digits to be seen. At last there appears to be agreement that strict proportionality must be ensured. In 1987 we had appeared to have achieved a better democracy when majority rule was enshrined in the Constitution. By 1992 it was clear it had been an emergency measure and so shortsighted that it did not take into account the possibility of Malta ever having more than just two political parties.

The emergence of the AD in 1989 challenged the Noah's Ark mentality and presented an altogether different political scenario. By 1992 it was clear that AD could explode the 1987 50 per cent +1 compromise solution. It had polled 1.7 per cent of the vote, the best result for a third party in 25 years. Both our adversaries realised they had come within a whisker of both being driven under the 50 per cent mark.

The Gonzi Commission was set up to address this matter and did so only to the extent that the Constitution was amended once more to ensure rule by a relative majority if only two parties were represented in Parliament, both scoring under 50 per cent. It was a bitter moment for the Greens. We had brought about a change in the Constitution but our adversaries had left us facing a 16.6 per cent electoral threshold and an exacerbation of the frenzy about the importance of the No. 1 vote.

In the politically most Anglicised country in the Mediterranean, where voters choose a government rather than express their intellectual affinity with a political idea, the Greens also faced the novelty of political party ownership of television stations. The anomaly soon became Maltese normality. At the time the Broadcasting Authority allowed us 12 minutes per annum of the 900 minutes of party political broadcasting and claimed it achieved the balance in broadcasting required by the Constitution by allowing our adversaries to "balance each other out". It was and remains a farce. The PN claimed to have given the country pluralism. For the Greens it was minimal pluralism. Anything less would make us a one-party state.

It is with these people that we sit and negotiate Malta's future political development. We are clearly aware that they consider their own party interests first and last. From our perspective, their democratic credentials can be written on the head of a very small pin. They will determine not only our future as Greens but all our futures, our common future.

They, not the Greens, will establish an electoral threshold. In practice it will not apply to the parties which will define it but only to us, their adversaries. They do not only have the Greens in mind but all those who may be tempted to escape from their omnivorous party structures. Not all dissidents are Green. There are others locked into the Red/Blue political prisons which claim to represent everybody, say everything and the opposite of everything at once.

Never before has Malta shown such a craving for political change. A massive 25 per cent did not vote for our two adversaries or did not vote at all in the European Parliament elections. In a Maltese context it was a massive political earthquake. The PN shed 44,000 votes over the 2003 election while the Labour Party managed to shrink in the face of a defeated government shedding a further 14,000 votes from its loss 12 months before. Our adversaries will do all in their power to ensure that this political ferment is bottled up once more. It would be a denial of history.

It does not take a wizard to guess that our adversaries now agree to a national five per cent threshold: Alfred Sant has publicly mentioned the figure and Lawrence Gonzi has proposed a return to the Gonzi Commission where the same figure was toyed with. We will have to grin and bear it: the Greens will enter Parliament with three MPs or not at all while strict proportionality will do justice to our adversaries between them.

It will be a different Parliament with three Green MPs to present views outside the Tweedledee and Tweedledum paradigm. Parliament could achieve a separate life from that of the government. The people could come to own it and the government could come to admit that it holds power on loan from the people. We could secure a political common ground on vital national issues.

Fifteen years ago the Greens promised the country a democratic alternative to the zero-sum politics of the two-party system. It has been an uphill climb for us to deliver. We have never given up trying and today we can sense that we can and we will be able to give our country the steady, mature, long-term politics it deserves. We will be able to make our own particular contribution making room for the diversity suppressed in a two-party system oppressed by mono-mindedness. They too will benefit by the change. We're almost there at last.

Dr Vassallo is chairman of Alternattiva Demokratika - The Green Party.

www.alternattiva.org.mt