Manifestly Political – a zolabyte

AD’s PRO André Vella has submitted this post as a Zolabyte. In this piece and accompanying infographic Vella compares how the three parties square up before all the manifestos were published. 

A political manifesto is the official seal of approval of a party’s agenda when (and if) in power; but the truth is that certain policies and positions are already lauded in public before approved by any party executive or general meeting.

For any political party, there are two types of issues. The issues you want to avoid, and the issue you can’t stop to talk about. Then there are the not so clear issues which are somewhere in between. Let’s take gay civil rights for example. PL want to flaunt their stance of civil union (which is more liberal than PN) but they do not want to focus on their contradictory inequality of what they are proposing (by not granting gay couples full rights). PN want to talk about gay rights as well, to regain that conservative base by scaring them with the image of a little child having two daddies, doing so knowingly that they might risk alienating the few pink votes they have. For the Green Party, at least, this issue is not in the middle as they took the clearest path towards gay marriage, being the only party fully endorsing MGRM’s proposes.

Somehow, the bigger parties always have the greatest challenge to appease as many people as possible, a task which fails most of the time as you cannot bind a long-serving successful party to populism instead of an ideology.

So while we all wait for the three manifestos to be officially approved, here is a little Infographic, shedding light on some party positions depending on public remarks passed by party officials or press releases. If it looks biased, it is because it is. Until the manifestos are publicly available, this is the pre-manifesto showdown of Malta Elections 2013!

The author is the PRO of Alternattiva Demokratika – The Green Party.

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Zolabytes is a rubrique on J’accuse – the name is a nod to the original J’accuser (Emile Zola) and a building block of the digital age (byte). Zolabytes is intended to be a collection of guest contributions in the spirit of discussion that has been promoted by J’accuse on the online Maltese political scene for 7 years.
Opinions expressed in zolabyte contributions are those of the author in question. Opinions appearing on zolabytes do not necessarily reflect the editorial line of J’accuse the blog.
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