Vote Green too

Twenty-five years ago Malta went through its most traumatic electoral experience when the Labour government was returned to power despite losing to the Nationalist Party that had gained an absolute majority of the vote. The years that followed were a bloody battle.

It was this democratic disaster that led to the constitutional amendments in 1987, which ensured majority rule, the 50 per cent +1 amendment. Although the price for it was the neutrality provisions in the Constitution, which some Nationalists still resent, it is still regarded as a step forward.

It was not. It called a truce in our smouldering civil war. It did not end the war. It brought no lasting peace. The spectacular gerrymandering of the 1981 election, including a psychedelic map joining distant and unrelated electoral areas as well as the establishment of government housing estates to tip the scales in favour of the government, were the product of the no-holds-barred politics of the preceding decades. Labour cheated because it had felt cheated before.

There is a thread that joins the turmoil of the 1950s to the bizarre 1960s, to the structural violence of the 1970s and to the physical violence of the 1980s. Just as our major political parties constantly justify their own failings by pointing to equally shameful precedents in their adversaries' past, they justify their violence to democracy by pointing to similar violence perpetrated by the other side. Labourites recall what was probably the last political excommunication by the Catholic Church in history, banning the faithful from voting Labour in the 1960s. The Nationalists recall the oppression, the physical and mental cruelty, the beatings, the killings and the bombings of the 1980s.

It was with this bloody background that the Greens came on the scene in 1989. Our 1.7 per cent result in 1992 was simply amazing. It also exposed the short-term thinking of the 1987 amendment: the 50 per cent + 1 rule only worked if one of the two parties gained an absolute majority of the vote. The Greens had clearly made the point that the two parties were no longer alone and that they had come within a whisker of both being driven under the 50 per cent mark. It had not occurred to the Nationalist Party and the Malta Labour Party that their duo may not last forever. Their view of democracy was limited to the extremely polarised bi-partisan mutual destruction system they had become used to.

Tripartite talks on electoral reform started soon afterwards. The 1995 Gonzi Commission Report was the unfruitful product. The PN proposed a five per cent threshold but no agreement was reached on the method to implement it. The final product was an extension of the uneasy truce between the PN and the MLP. Their 50 per cent + 1 arrangement from 1987 was re-cobbled to serve also in the event that neither of them made the 50 per cent mark but were alone elected to Parliament. The 16 per cent threshold operated in each electoral district remained in place and on top of it the paroxysms of hysteria attached to the first preference vote created first in 1987 now reached new heights. Our electoral system, specifically designed to produce a multiparty Parliament fully articulating the political diversity we still possess, had been completely denatured. The Greens fared badly in 1996 and no better in 1998.

The EU accession election of 2003 was another matter altogether. Our arithmetical result, a mere 0.7 per cent or 1,929 votes, hid a great victory. For the previous few years we had inevitably run in tandem with the PN and joined in a common effort to secure EU membership. Our participation in the EU referendum campaign had been a crucial contribution. With the general election called immediately afterwards and the MLP insisting that only such an election would determine the issue regardless of the referendum result, alliance talks with the PN were necessary, if for no other reason, to display our willingness to cooperate further at this historic juncture.

It had been clear to the Greens from months before that the PN would not play ball. They hoped to manoeuvre us into a position in which contesting the election would be seen to threaten the whole edifice of EU membership for Malta. Once the negotiations became public we had achieved our first target: displaying our willingness to cooperate. What remained then was a safe exit. We knew that we did not have a potential partner in the PN and all we were after was to deny them any opportunity to accuse us of being greedy, of demanding too much for our help. We asked for nothing at all, just to form a common front in terms of our common-stated policy on the issue, which was the only issue in that election. We knew that the PN could never accept since that would allow a huge swathe of voters in the PN fold to prefer the Greens; for the first time they would have felt free to vote no. 1 for another party.

The PN wanted it all: a monopoly of the EU referendum victory, untrammelled power in government after the election and elimination of the Greens from the political horizon by forcing us not to contest the election. After that we would no longer be considered to be a political party at law, our pittance of airtime in official broadcasts would disappear and we would be invisible in the EP election campaign in 2004. Their last word was a "bribe": if we did not contest the election they would reward us afterwards by co-opting one of us to Parliament. We said thanks but no thanks. The talks ended.

With only days to go to the election, we still had to sort out our strategy to survive as a party and not to threaten the confirmation of the EU referendum victory. We solved the dilemma thanks to the electoral system. We would forfeit our no. 1 votes in favour of the PN regardless of its duplicity. We asked our supporters to give us their no. 2 vote this time around.

In the eighth electoral district, contested by the other two party leaders, this strategy could still have landed us in Parliament. The huge surpluses of no. 2 votes available there could have transferred to AD in sufficient numbers. Our strategy drove the PN leadership to its lowest levels. The final speech of the PN campaign included a 20-minute harangue against the Greens telling a blatant untruth that our strategy was somehow a threat to EU membership.

It was the easiest of vote counts to watch. Our result was a foregone conclusion and engineered by us. My comment when the results were announced was that the PN had gained victory without honour and we had won the hearts and minds of the Maltese if not their votes.

Our reward came in 2004 when 9.2 per cent voted for Arnold Cassola. Compared to the general election results 12 months earlier, the PN had lost tens of thousands of votes and the MLP thousands more from its previous failure. The Greens had skyrocketed from 1,929 votes to 23,000 votes, an increase of 1,300 per cent, giving the lie forever to the cliché about ever declining Green electoral fortunes.

Dr Cassola was not elected because the PN block vote resulted in a wastage of thousands of PN and Yes to EU votes when the last PN candidate was eliminated. Dr Cassola's vote combined with the now useless PN surplus could have snatched victory away from the last remaining MLP candidate.

In the tripartite talks on electoral reform, which have dragged on since 2005, our counterparts have lived up to expectations. The PN has reneged on its 1995 five per cent threshold proposal coming up with a ludicrous 7.5 per cent. Labour have been true to type and proposed that they govern alone if they gain at least 45 per cent of the vote regardless of the fact that PN and AD combined would account for 55 per cent. Now they have concluded the process as in 1995 with two-party talks and the usual conspiracy against democracy. Promising one another proportional representation they have no qualms denying it to all others. No wonder they prefer negotiations in secret.

As far as they are concerned the Greens could gain 16.99 per cent of the vote nationwide in the next election and not have a single seat in Parliament. Twenty years after the democratic fiasco of 1987 they are still exclusively concerned with their own partisan interests and still have no regard for democracy. They are our political dinosaurs extending their mutual fear, mistrust and all-out war into the third millennium.

Thankfully, our electoral system has several backdoor options to it. First of all cross-party voting. Every Maltese and Gozitan voter can vote Green without in any way affecting the outcome of the election in terms of no. 1 votes. It will make a huge difference to democracy. At no risk or cost at all, they will be showing a very special form of solidarity with those of us who will be voting no. 1 for the Greens.

We would welcome this sign of democratic solidarity defying the culture of death and violence perpetuated in electoral structural, which is the legacy of the zero-sum feuding of the other parties. We need not be bashful about it; we know we deserve as much and know that all others know it too. In this election everybody can vote Green to end an era, to put the past behind us and to start afresh. It is a simple choice: for or against democracy.

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

www.alternattiva.org.mt www.adgozo.com