The people's President

In his article A Presidential Lottery? (January 10), Alternattiva Demokratika chairman Arnold Cassola claimed that the desire of the people to have a say in the choice of President was evident. We had already had "our 51 per cent Presidents for the past 33 years".

The idea that a broader elective principle should be adopted in electing the Head of State - who, obviously, should be a moderating role model embodying a profound sense of nationhood - is not new. Nor has it been limited to any one party or lobby group.

Indeed, way back in the late 1980s, a Select Committee of the House of Representatives had discussed possible changes to the presidency, which would have required amending the Constitution as they would still do today. As matters stand, the President is "elected by a resolution of the House".

In the mid-1990s, there was talk even in Nationalist quarters that, short of a national election, councils representing all our localities should be included in such a "new" process of selection, a proposal which my colleagues and I then serving on the College of Mayors had supported.

The possibility of increased powers for the Presidency had also been mooted, albeit under the shadow of a possible interest in the office by no other than Dom Mintoff.

The long and short of it is that nothing really changed, at least not constitutionally, other perhaps than the would-be exclusion of a Chief Justice from the candidature to help safeguard impartiality.

There are two points in Dr Cassola's otherwise interesting article that bear some elaboration, however.

To say that every President elected for the past 33 years was "always a President elected on party lines" is an under-statement. Each and every President since 1976 - Anton Buttigieg, Agatha Barbara, Ċensu Tabone, Ugo Mifsud Bonnici, Guido de Marco and Eddie Fenech Adami - has not only been elected on party lines but has himself been a working politician, not only a politician in the sense of having been an active parliamentarian but indeed a Cabinet minister including, in the last case, a former Prime Minster. To say nothing of the anomaly reserved for Pawlu Xuereb, who was Acting President (sic) for two years and who is generally disregarded by commentators as if he never existed. If we exclude Mr Xuereb, out of our seven Heads of State so far, no fewer than five have been lawyers.

A second point made by Dr Cassola, himself a former parliamentarian (in Italy), is this. A "good number" of our elected Presidents had then to face "the boycott of the opposition MPs following their election". This is not quite correct.

As I noted in my biography Ċensu Tabone: The Man And His Century (Maltese Studies, 2000, 2nd ed 2001, pp. 275-276): "Apart from the sui generis case of Sir Anthony Mamo, a former Chief Justice who became President for what was left of his term as Governor-General after Dorman, none of the other Presidents had been unanimously approved by the Maltese Parliament. The Nationalists had voted against Anton Buttigieg because of a frightful statement he had uttered in Parliament during a tense moment when he was the Minister for Justice ("jekk imissu xi xagħra minn ta' xi wieħed minnha ħadd minnkom ma joħroġ ħaj minn hawn illejla" [if they even touch one hair of any of us, none of them will leave here alive tonight])."

Miss Barbara had been named after the 1981 election when the Nationalists were boycotting Parliament because of the "perverse result", so she was approved by the government members voting by themselves. Mr Xuereb never actually became President. For one reason or another - not difficult to call in a Maltese milieu - none of their successors, all PN grandees, attracted a consensual vote.

However, the only official opposition boycott as such was directed at Dr Tabone when he moved from Palazzo Parisio to Sant'Anton in 1989. I have discussed this whole question of the Maltese Presidency at length in chapter 15 of the said biography (President-Ambassador: A Father to the Nation, pp. 273-296).

Very briefly, what happened was this.

When the Nationalists finally returned to office in 1987, Malta did not actually have a President. Mr Xuereb, a former Labour minister who had resigned his parliamentary seat in April 1983 to permit the co-option of the MLP's designate-leader Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, had been appointed Acting President in 1987 after he had been Speaker for a year or so and so he had remained: Acting.

When the Nationalist majority in Parliament voted in favour of Dr Tabone to be a fully-fledged President, at Dr Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici's bidding the opposition ordered a social boycott against him. This was unprecedented.

Dr Tabone, himself a former member of the Select Committee purportedly designating what the President's stature and role should be, was the first Nationalist appointee to first citizen status since Malta had shed off its constitutional monarchy and become a republic in 1974 (by a two-thirds majority in the House).

Soon enough, however, Dr Tabone began to endear himself to all sides demonstrating a genuine, populist patriotism and consulting, especially after Alfred Sant became MLP leader and Leader of the Opposition in 1992. So much so that when his Presidency was nearing the end of its term in 1994, it was Dr Sant's opposition that, in another unprecedented gesture, suggested that if the government wished, his term could be extended.

That surely put paid to any boycott tradition. But that, too, would have required a constitutional amendment (which mercifully never materialised).