Nationalists are a legally elected government without moral authority to govern - like 1981

It seems that the Nationalists took umbrage because former Foreign Minister Alex Sceberras Trigona exercised his fundumantal right of freedom of expression and wrote an academic article in this paper.

In the article he tried to show that, when one deputy resigned from the Nationalist Parliamentary Group, he shook the foundations of a wafer thin majority supporting the Prime Minister because the Constitution provided a mechanism to grant four extra seats to the Nationalist Party on grounds that it obtained a relative majority of votes over the Labour Party.

When Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando pulled out of the PN, his move brought the country face to face with a problem which Dr Sceberras Trigona expounded in a scholarly interpretation of the Constitution. I am no constitutional expert and, therefore, I am not writing to defend or condemn his thesis.

As Labour leader Joseph Muscat clearly explained this is a purely academic matter and I will not enter into a matter that baffles even constitutional lawyers and University professors. I am writing not to defend Dr Sceberras Trigona personally from below-the-belt attacks unleashed by the PN and its friendly bloggers.

I am irked by the PN’s stubborn convinction that it is “unique” and so what is sauce for the Nationalist goose is not so for the Labour gander.

If one admits that the 1981 Labour government had no moral authority to govern because although, legally and constitutionally, it had obtained a parliamentary majority, the voters had rejected it by giving the PN 51 per cent of the popular vote, one also has to accept that the Gonzi government lost its electoral mandate a few months after its installment when the Prime Minister was obliged to backtrack on the St John’s Co-Cathedral project not to be humiliated in Parliament when a number of his MPs made it clear they would vote No.

As time rolled on, Lawrence Gonzi’s parliamentary majority was shaken from its foundations when he had the divorce legislation forced down his throat by the parliamentary rebellion of two of his MPs and then smashed to pieces when one of his top ministers was felled by a Nationalist MP’s vote and chief PN guru, Richard Cachia Caruana, axed by another dissident.

After the PN national executive interdicted the three dissident MPs from contesting the elections on its list and Dr Pullicino Orlando pulled out of the party, it is clear that Dr Gonzi’s parliamentary majority is no more.

All this brings us to the crux of the matter.

In 1981, we had a legally-elected government without moral authority to do so and, today, we have another legally-elected government also lacking the moral authority to continue in office.

In 1981, the PN knew that the PL had every consititional right to govern, otherwise they would have taken their case to the Constititional Court.

But how could they ever dare to do so when the great majority of Nationalist MPs joined the Labour side to vote for a Consitution against which they were then protesting?

They went to extremes to make their point, culminating in a long boycott of Parliament. The PL, although it has before it a government shorn of a solid parliamentary majority and of all moral authority, never dreamed of taking such drastic and undemocratic action. All that happened was that its international secretary dared to make use of his right to express himself on a very hot issue in pure academic terms. But, perhaps, the Nationalists feel and believe that Labourites are children of a lesser god and so “they are not as other men are”.

This PN claim of “uniqueness” is really disturbing and, what’s worse, dangerous (to democracy and liberty). The pretension to be a chosen people in whosever name it is made is always odious because these always treat the others “as lesser breeds outside the law” (Kipling’s Recessional).

All those who feel and act as if they are chosen by God to be His own, all seem to me to have been chosen by no one except themselves.

All free men will never recognise the uniqueness of these pretenders. After a quarter of a century of rule, the iron of uniqueness has entered the PN’s soul.

It would be better for the country and also for them if they were to take a look at the human tragedies and enormities performed by all those who had convinced themselves that they are God’s own.

Let them learn the lesson which Rabbi J.B. Agus gave us all in his book Judaism: “Uniqueness as an innate quality of being is exclusive in character, invidious in intent, invariably offensive.”