Tag: opposition

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Mediawatch

Leader of the Opposition

Adrian Delia is frantically fighting a race against time. It has become increasingly evident that his gamble for leadership of the nationalist party did not include the foresight or plan that would account for the fact that he needs to find a way to get into parliament. This lack of foresight does not bode well for the nationalist party – that it is lead by someone unable to make the most simple of calculations is not exactly a bright light for the future. If my sources are right, plan B for Delia and his entourage seems to be the harassing of a number of MPs that are judged as most likely to want (or to be forced) to give up their seat and make way for the half-heartedly anointed one. It is a clumsy and roundabout way of doing things that jars conspicuously with the declared marketing of TeamDelia of wanting to unite the party behind Adrian as quickly as possible.

Unwitting supporters have even been asked to turn their guns onto the PD as though the damned coalition meant that the Democratic Party owed the Nationalist Party anything other than collaboration in parliament against the forces of corruption. Kudos to Marlene Farrugia who has strongly retorted that she will not be turned in this respect and that the PD will jump at any chance to take the place of any MP who chooses to call it quits and force a by-election. Of course Delia and his team will choose to take this opportunity to ride roughshod over the concept of coalition and collaboration – hatred of anything the coalition was about is after all one of the hallmarks of Delia’s New Way. So much for a deeper understanding of the changes that are necessary in the way politics is made.

But what about the Holy Grail position of the Leader of the Opposition? Well, constitutionally we are in a bit of a conundrum. First of all, none of the conditions that create a vacancy of the position of Leader of Opposition (Article 90(3) of the Constitution) has been fulfilled so technically since Simon Busuttil is still a member of the House of Representatives and consequently has not vacated the position. Let us assume that by informing the President of his intention to no longer lead the nationalist party, Simon Busuttil has de facto given up his place as Leader of the Opposition that he occupied under the terms of 90(2)(a) of the Constitution. In that case, until Delia manages to find a way into Parliament we can try to see who can legitimately fill that constitutional role come the 1st of October. Whichever scenario you take, whether it is under article 90(2)(a) (the MP who leads the opposition party with the largest number of members) or under article 90(4) (If, in the judgment of the President, a member of the House of Representatives other than the Leader of the Opposition, has become the Leader in the House of the opposition party having the greatest numerical strength in the House) – in both cases the Leader of the Opposition is (a) a member of the house and (b) commands/leads the largest number of opposition members. In the absence of the party leader (Adrian Delia) the obvious constitutional choice until the dilemma is solved is to nominate the Deputy Leader for Parliamentary matters (Mario DeMarco) as the Leader of the Opposition.

Sure, it can be a strange situation where the Leader of the Party is not the same person as the Leader of the Opposition but this does not mean that it cannot and will not work. As I said, Delia should have foreseen this situation before he decided to throw in his name as a leadership candidate. It’s not like he was not asked the question as from the start of his campaign. Even a minimum of constitutional knowledge would have told him that no MP on any side of the house owes any party anything. The seats are not theirs to give – they have been elected by their constituents and owe them the duty of representation. Giving up that seat for a man who only three months ago was unwilling to represent any part of the nation would be a betrayal of their constituents of the highest order.

I am quite sure that in the end one MP will be found who will give in to the heavy handed tactics of TeamDelia. It does not bode well at all though. It is one thing to elbow your way into the leadership of a party, it is another altogether to bulldoze your way into a constitutional position without the least bit of deference to the constitutional principles that underlie a constitutional democracy.

 

 

Categories
NRD

therealopposition.com

Here’s another one for the New Republic Dictionary – where’s the real opposition? Andrew Borg Cardona beat me to this reflection yesterday in his Times blog (Snappy Little Annoyances). This is no race though and ABC’s pondering only comforted my thinking in the sense that if other people are reaching the same conclusions then the concept might be worth a moment of elaboration and analysis. In this case the idea (or question provoking the idea) is simple: Who is performing the work of the real opposition in Malta nowadays? Surely, I hear you protest,  it’s Joseph Muscat and his merry band of “għaqlin”. Well no it isn’t.

If we needed any confirmation of the absolute abdication by the Malta Labour Party from its duties as a real opposition then the run up to the budget and subsequent follow up have given us enough to digest. There they were arming their cannons with the fodder of overused cliches about the cost-of-living and the water and electricity bills. The likes of Luciano Busuttil, Cyrus Engerer and Leo Brincat crammed social networks with “warnings” that the government benches’ vocabulary would be rife with references to the international state of economic affairs – like that would be a bad thing. The “opposition” wanted you to believe that a government presenting its budget in November 2011 was obliged to do so without thinking about what was going on in France, Spain, Greece and Italy. Basically according to Labour, our Budget in Times of Crisis had to ignore the Eurozone in its entirety.

Did “we the people” fall for it? Well the “sarcastic” elements of the web might have found something to chew on – coming up with Eurovision-like games about the number of times Tonio F would mention the PIGS (that’s Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain and not the porcine patterers) but on the whole the reaction to what on the surface seems to be a very family oriented and equity-driven budget (“equity” that’s a word to hang on to nowadays) seems to be relatively positive and unaffected by Labour’s shenanigans. There is hope yet.

We cannot be distracted though by the sanity of the PN budget planning. Two years before a general election it behooves us to drill the fact that Joseph Muscat’s Labour has not only been caught with its pants down but (if you forgive the extensive milking of the metaphor) it is very evidently lacking any signs of puberty – let alone full blown maturity. We couldn’t put it simpler – the Labour opposition is transparently unable to come to terms with the simplest of facts: a budget is not only where to spend your money but also about where it will be coming from.

Muscat is headstrong about the downsizing of water and electricity bills (while expecting Tonio Fenech to both announce a hike AND a cut in the utility bills) but cannot be brought to explain to anyone who cares to listen where the hell the money to cover those cuts will be coming from. Broad statements and planning coming from the opposition involve spending more and cutting less or some half-baked plans about alternative forms of energy. This while Sarkozy’s government (shit, he mentioned France) is hell-bent on AUSTERITY, SuperMario (darn.,there goes Italy) has been installed to supervise a cost-cutting and tax-hiking exercise to tackle the spread, and Greece (no, don’t mention the Greeks) is battling for survival with the latest technical government.

Even in a time of crisis where in other countries (sorry but they exist) opposition members co-operate with governments in order to perform the tightrope act of equitable measures that might just about keep the euro bomb from exploding, Muscat wants to play at the traditional, old fashioned opposition selling unsustainable populist wares to what he hopes is a sufficiently gullible and greedy electorate.

Which brings me back to the question. Who is the real opposition? Well the likes of Franco Debono embody the kind of unlovable opposition (from a government point of view) that we really deserve. Even with a crisis looming backbenchers found time to rap the government hand on such issues as responsibility in transport reform, divorce legislation, and now criminal justice reform. They did not hesitate to throw themselves four-square behind the government when it came to the all-important measures related to economic stability. better still we got an added bonus because the government could plan confidently and include incentives that remind us of the true worth of christian-democrat politics when practised properly.

The New Republic has the potential to banish futile, old-fashioned oppositions from their undeserved seats and benches in parliament. Joseph Muscat’s failure to breathe fresh air into an old and tired Labour might find that the final test will be an unfortunate one for his fate and of those who would love to preserve the old fashioned way of the all-nixing opposition. Far from being progressive, Muscat and his minions have proved to be a clunking metal ball at the foot of real progress in constitutional, institutional and republican matters. The sooner the Republic is rid of this baggage the faster everyone gets to move on.

 

Categories
Jasmine Politics

There are no men in Tripoli

I came across this real story in the middle of a BBC news item about Tripoli eyewitnesses. It speaks volumes and does not need any additional comment.

An old woman, in her late 70s at least, I’m told, entered the bank to collect her 500 Libyan dollars ($410; £253) in state aid announced a couple of weeks ago.

There were two long queues – one for men and one for women. She stood in the men’s queue.

The men urged her to move to the women’s section. “Why?” she challenged.

A man told her: “Ya haja [a term of respect for an elderly woman] this line is for men, women is the other one”.

She loudly replied: “No. All the men are in Benghazi.”

The room is said to have been stunned into silence and she remained in her place until her turn came and she walked out with her money.

It is perhaps a bittersweet private reminder of how frustrated many here are at the lack of efforts in Tripoli in recent weeks to defy the regime and take to the streets.

The joke doing the rounds among the silent opposition in Tripoli is that upon liberation the Benghazi people will bring container loads of women’s underwear for the men in Tripoli.

***

On a separate note here is a brilliant article by the UK Independent’s  Robert Fisk exploring the feelings of families who lost loved ones as  “collateral damage” in previous attempts to hit at Gaddafi. Sgarbi and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici might have an opinion about civilians faultlessly involved in this preventive intervention but their opinion pales in comparison to that of a mother who lost her daughter in 1986 following an US bombing in retaliation to the Berlin discotheque bombing by Gaddafi. I for one did not expect this kind of answer from her.

But it was with some trepidation that I called them yesterday. Mrs Ghosain answered the phone. “I hope they get him this time,” she said. And I asked, timidly, if she meant the man with the moustache. Colonel Gaddafi has a moustache. Mr Obama does not. “Yes,” she said. “I mean Ghazzefi.” “Ghazzefi” is the Lebanese Arabic pronunciation of the man’s name.

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