On votes of confidence then and now

Over the past eventful days ma­ny commentators compared the votes of confidence faced by Lawrence Gonzi’s government to those faced by Alfred Sant in 1998.

The constitutional similarities are indeed many. In both cases, votes of confidence, called by the respective Prime Ministers, were provoked by an overall one-seat majority in the House of Representatives coming missing. In both situations there were occasions when the respective Speakers of the House resorted to their casting vote after a tie between government and opposition votes and, in observance of parliamentary practice, they cast their vote to allow the continuation of the debate by leaving the status quo.

However, to-date, the opposition have not presented a vote of no-confidence in the government in terms of the Constitution, which, if carried by the absolute majority of the members of the House, activates a constitutional mechanism involving directly the President of Malta. In 1998, the Nationalist opposition had proposed one but Dom Mintoff had not obliged to follow suit.

The main differences between a vote of confidence proposed by the government and a vote of no confidence proposed by the opposition lie in that a vote of confidence is decided by a simple majority to be approved and also in that the consequences in the case of a defeat are largely of a political nature. Should a vote of confidence be defeated it opens a political crisis that is left to the political system itself to work out, albeit under the vigilant eye of the President as is happening in Italy following a show of lack of confidence in the Berlusconi government.

In this regard the differences between the events of 1998 and those of the past days seem very different from each other.

The 1998 crisis was clearly of a much more profound political nature than the current one. A look at the reporting of The Times on the Cottonera vote of confidence of July 8, 1998 clearly shows that the crisis was not about the disaffection of a member of Parliament on the manner in which particular administrative issues are being handled by this or that particular minister and that MP’s slipping away from the hold of the party Whip.

In this regard, The Times’ reporting makes very instructive reading indeed! In it we see the deep divisions within the Labour parliamentary group being displayed before all of Malta in what was described as “one of the rowdiest sittings ever” of the House. Incumbent ministers engaged former Labour ministers, including Mr Mintoff, a former Prime Minister, in shouting contests, the former leader being “booed outside Parliament and there was some commotion with party supporters milling around. Mr Mintoff was surrounded by the police” reported The Times.

A minister of the time, today a member of Labour’s shadow Cabinet, was reported to have gra-bbed the grand old man of the Labour movement within the pre-cincts of the House. Typical of Mr Mintoff, he “stood up and for a few seconds the two were locked in an arm to arm struggle”.

With the fracas spilling out in the roads, the soldiers on duty inside the palace “carrying ma-chine guns bolted the doors, which remained shut for around 10 interminable minutes”. When nothing seemed to work, it was reported that supporters were invoked by Labour grandees to go home to watch a football match involving Brazil!

While, of course, these scenes were the result of a vote of confidence being defeated by the House whereas the ones of today ended in favour of the government, yet they do demonstrate the extent to which Labour was radically split on lines of the generational chasm that had erupted between the “new” Sant faction and that of the old timers around Mr Mintoff, a split that manifested itself at the election of September 1998 and in which Mr Mintoff and a number of prominent Mintoffians chose not to contest.

Clearly, while Dr Gonzi would be very wise not to underestimate the embarrassment and the thr-eat to the government caused by the evident lack of control which the party and the Whip have on individual MPs, the present stability of the government seems assured since there do not appear internal profound splits either of a generational or of an ideological nature within the majority party or its parliamentary group when compared to the events of 1998.