In March 2005, the PN, under its wily secretary general, Joe Saliba (above), pulled a fast one with local council elections. Photo: Darrin Zammit LupiIn March 2005, the PN, under its wily secretary general, Joe Saliba (above), pulled a fast one with local council elections. Photo: Darrin Zammit Lupi

The government has floated the idea – to ‘all stakeholders’ – that all local council elections be postponed to 2019, to coincide with the next European Parliament election. In a democracy, all registered voters are stakeholders. So what should we make of the proposal?

Whatever we decide, it’s going to be difficult not to agree with Joseph Muscat. He has admirably summed up both sides of the issue, arguing for one side one year and leaning towards another today.

In 2014, he appears to be leaning heavily to seeing rolling, four-year local council elections as an unnecessary expense, a cause of electoral fatigue and a contributor to lower voter turnouts. And, for reasons I will come to, he will find some cross-party support for that position among voters.

In 2005, however, he could see the other side of the coin very lucidly. In March that year, the PN, under that wily secretary general, Joe Saliba, pulled a fast one with local council elections.

The Nationalist government was facing a hammering at the polls, which could not be avoided. However, the final percentages summing up the distance between the parties could be toyed with. A smaller official gap between the Labour and the PN would do wonders for party morale.

So, at the very last minute, Saliba had four PN candidates, in the Labour strongholds of Żejtun and Marsa, withdraw their candidatures, with the result that no election was needed (as the number of candidates then equalled the number of available seats). Since there was no election, the outcomes of Żejtun and Marsa were not included in the official computation of the result.

The move, while perfectly legal, enraged many supporters of the PN, who called it undemocratic. There were stern editorials, including in this newspaper. Labour also joined in the criticism.

Writing in L-Orizzont on March 2, 2005, Muscat expressed his solidarity with those who had lost the right to express their opinion with their vote. He criticised the then government of being afraid of people’s vote – that is, of the idea of democracy as something that needed to be practised regularly.

In 2012, now Opposition leader, he returned to the issue. By that time, the Sliema local council, led by the PN, was in near chaos. The then PN government decided to dissolve the council and call for an election. Muscat was critical of this decision but he refused to do away with an election by withdrawing Labour candidates at the last minute.

As reported by the Labour news website, Maltastar, Muscat said that for Labour democracy was not a plaything. In other words, the politicians filling the local council seats were not mere numbers. They were individuals and people had a right to have their choices respected. On the same occasion, he also recognised the importance of elections to pull up weakly performing local councils by their bootstraps.

So there you have it. One couldn’t sum it up better. Are local council elections just a theatrical sop towards voter choice but whose postponement in actual fact won’t make much of a difference?

Or are they an essential brick of a democratic culture, whose regular occurrence is essential to a democratic set-up more generally? The case for postponement is likely to find some cross-party support among voters. Local councils tend to have a bad name, or, at least, to breed relative indifference.

This tendency is stronger (or, it has been so far) among the PN’s core voters, at least as measured in voter turnout when compared with Labour.

It’s empty rhetoric, hypocrisy, gratuitous insult and avoidance of the real issues that tire voters

Of course, that tendency has been influenced by the fact that, for the last 20 years, almost the entire life of local councils has been lived under a Nationalist government. From circa 2000 onwards, local council elections were the perfect opportunity for the PN core voters to express admonitory anger against the party they belonged to.

Clearly, the pendulum can be expected to swing the other way now that Labour is in charge of central government. One would have to be naive to think that it has not crossed the Prime Minister’s mind that a postponement of local council elections by several years would have the collateral effect of sparing Labour some electoral embarrassment and giving Simon Busuttil a scalp or two.

But attitudes are not just driven by who’s in charge in Castille. There is a genuine sentiment, including among some people who should know better, that local councils are simply launch pads for party hacks but not much more.

That’s not true. There is an entire typology of local councils. In the larger towns, the political parties can play a decisive role in taming (or turning a blind eye to) powerful commercial interests disguised as local civic enterprise.

To me it seems that the arguments Muscat made up till recently outweigh the ones being made today.

First, voter fatigue isn’t caused by elections. It’s caused by politicians and the manner of campaigning. It’s empty rhetoric, hypocrisy, gratuitous insult and avoidance of the real issues that tire voters. If exercising choice were tiring, shopping would be a shunned activity.

Second, there is the issue of lower voter turnouts. Again, it’s highlighting the real issues that turn the vote out.

There’s something else. The point of lowering the voting age to 16 was to raise voter turnout and educate youth in the practice of participative democracy as a part of civic culture. If the proposal to postpone elections goes through, the whole point of lowering the voting age would be lost. The government would appear to have lost confidence in the very motive behind the change.

The point does not touch only turnout. It also affects the idea raising new generations of voters to be enthused about participating in elections – both as voters and as candidates for office themselves.

The proposal, as it stands, risks not only demotivating a new generation – since they won’t have the opportunity to participate even if they want to.

It actually risks lower voter turnouts in the future if we raise a generation of voters (five years is a long time when you’re 16; it’s a third of your life) who just are not used to voting.

We all lose out if that were to happen. Whatever the cost of local council elections, it has to be less than the cost of losing touch with democracy as a regular feature of civic culture.

ranierfsadni@europe.com

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