Joe Grima was pontificating along with Toni Abela and others about the "democratic deficit" with which, according to these philosophers, this company is afflicted. You have to marvel at the sheer nerve of the man: Joe Grima, a Minister in Mintoff's Government at the time when the paragons of democracy defied the electorate, has the sheer gall to tell us that democracy died in Malta in 1987.
This is the man who became a media mogul (well, I exaggerate for effect, he had a radio station which folded pretty quickly) virtually as soon as his days as a Minister of a Government, which had the same attitude towards free speech as your common or garden ayatollah, ended. He has the utter brass neck to sit in his Super One studio and perform selective plastic surgery on history, aided and abetted Dr Toni Abela.
According to these philosophers, then, Malta has a democratic deficit.
Astounding, when you think about it, how these people are so desperate to achieve power that they don't even think their superciliously smug pronouncements through. Seen from their myopic point of view, we have this "democratic deficit" because they're owed their turn in power, and thus there is a deficit in their favour. They ignore the plain and simple fact: they are not in power because the electorate, operating in a democracy, has kept them out, time and time again.
And whose fault is that, pray tell?
Well, if you ask people like Doctor Alfred Sant, it's an effect of the "power of incumbency", which makes about as much sense as his concurrent dictum that the "Partnership had won", presumably because he was morally convinced that it had done so, just as he had been morally convinced about so many fantasies during his time leading the Malta Labour Party.
Yes, Joe Grima, Toni Abela and Anglu Farrugia, actually we do have a democratic deficit, simply because the party you so love was packed so full of elements that alienated the electorate - that sent it into a blue funk, in fact - that it kept getting sent into opposition.
The deficit, if you want to call it that, lies at your own door, because by no fault of the other lot, your lot have proved themselves to be unelectable, time and time again.
The fact that there has been no real alternative to the PN for so many years is not evidence of any deficit in our democracy, a democracy that has flourished despite the attacks on it in the not-so-distant past.
The mere fact that Labour have not had what the proponents of "alternanza", a ridiculous concept in and of itself, call their "turn" is a reflection on no-one but Labour itself, the root cause of deficient democracy in Malta for longer than anyone should care to remember.