Tag: votes

Categories
Politics

They think it’s all over, it is now

match of the dayWhat better way than an historic footballing phrase to end this round of MEP elections that was characterised by a peppering of footballing jargon. I was told that I was still very pedantic in my posts (thanks markbiwwa) so I shall give you the bullet point view. Better still let’s do it pagelle style sticking to the footballing metaphor for a little while longer.

Final Result It dragged on for over 72 hours. We finally got a result. The fact of the matter is that the result was already there in the sealed ballot boxes before the counting began. Malta had voted with a significant downturn (80,000 non-voters) and the result was only waiting to be unveiled. It would be a laborious process made even more laborious by the fact that the two main parties were short of counters: the effect? Less agents to allow the skeleton crew to monitor every step. The PLPN system continues to debilitate our way of doing politics – down to making the smallest electorate’s decision the longest one to be read. Don’t get me started on ballot boxes abroad. Verdict: SLOW

Non-European I’ve tackled it elsewhere. There is nothing European about our MEP vote. The voters were dragged into another partisan sling-match and this resulted in a chain reaction of events that gave us most of the types of votes (see below). Interestingly you can compare the victorious Renzi’s approach to the result and that of Muscat. The former painted a red map of Italy – his first reaction was similar to that of our premier (we will not let this go to our heads), the second was to rush to Brussels with a clear message: this is a vote for change in Europe. The Maltese vote was absolutely not concerned about spreading representation in the European parliament for Malta’s best interests. It was all about “winning” over the eternal opponents. Verdict: ISLANDERS

Winners & Losers: There can be only one. That is the mantra that is sold time and time again when time comes for choosing representatives. This is the real winner takes all mentality that should not be translatable at a European level since we are choosing who represents us within the formations that make up the European Parliament. Instead we had the PM pouncing on polls and setting the target on an electoral “win” translatable in votes obtained while the opposition fell for the trap and accepted the challenge to a large extent. In the end, the “gain” for the Maltese is measured in how well represented they are in the European Parliament – at 3-3 it’s a draw between the Popular Parties and the Socialists. No Green representative yet again. At most if you really want a result it’s a resounding draw. Verdict: NO EXTRA TIME

Naming the votes: The ballot sheet had to be reprinted because of the Engerer debacle. More expense to the voters and a chance for more charades at partisan level leading to the infamous “suldati tal-azzar”. The alphabetical order gave us the “donkey vote” – unlike the one in Shrek this one is not funny and rather mechanical. Combined with the siege mentality born of partisan votes it meant that most times vote inheritance could be – to a certain extent – predicted. Bar the “protest vote” of course. Discounting the firmly convinced AD and Imperium voters you end up with a number of undecipherable cross-votes switching from right and left of the spectrum with an undignified nonchalance. Even the comical Zaren tal-Ajkla garnered a thousand plus votes that probably did not have the main parties laughing as much as the bored counters in the counting hall. Verdict: STICKS AND STONES

Racist Alarm: It’s a huge wart on these election results. Lowell bowed out rather late in the day having summed over 7,000 votes. You cannot see anything other than a warning sign in this. The intolerant vote is not one to be toyed with and the main parties are duty bound to tackle this head on without much ado while setting aside their partisan approach. Muscat’s final pre-electoral speech did woo the anti-immigrant lobby with much talk about standing firm – his record in this field is still not convincing when it comes to really understanding the humane approach – thankfully the warning signs were lit across the continent so there might be a renewed sense of cooperation among European leaders across the board. Verdict: SHAMEFUL

Simon Busuttil: The gun was jumped early in the vote count. The first result – the numerical one – was devastating for the PN. Many elements within the PN were as quick to speak of “defeat” as the elements in the PL were prepared to speak of “victory”. The after effects of the Busuttil vs Muscat bout were reaped at this moment – strike while it is hot. So on Monday and most of Tuesday the question put to Simon Busuttil was “Will you resign?” I do have the benefit of hindsight but it would have been much better for the the PN leader to wait until the sixth seat was finally decided before pronouncing himself on the matter. It’s all so different now that Comodini Cachia will be filling the last spot. Had the message been drummed earlier on about what constitutes a real victory in European terms there would not be so much of a conundrum within the PN. Sure, there is work to be done and it has to be done yesterday but given the starting point, the proximity of last years general election and the resources of the current PN the three-three draw is anything but a defeat. Verdict: SURVIVOR

The ladies: A pleasant aspect of the end result is the majority of women that will be flying up to Brussels and Strasbourg. Four out of Malta’s six MEPs are women. They deserve to be there in the same way as any other candidate deserves to be there. I am glad that this is a pleasant aspect of the outcome. It would be amiss though to not analyse this vote just like any other labelled vote. For a long time early in the counting process we heard about the Gozitan vote having an effect for example. There seems to have been some form of slight cross-voting between parties from women candidate to women candidate which cannot be ignored. Even if we grant that the last two (Mizzi and Comodini Cachia) benefited from the donkey vote in their own way there is still an acknowledgement to be made that women candidates found some special favour among the electorate (even within the labyrinth of partisan and protest voting). We cannot ignore the fact that women candidates could have been chosen over their male counterparts in an effort to provoke a different kind of change in the way politics is done. When I said it is a protest vote I meant a protest against the politics we have had until now dominated by male figures. If you like (prefer) call it a vote for change. Applaud it I will but in the end, as someone else has already commented, if they end up parroting their parties and allowing partisan politics to trump real representation then this change will not count for much. Verdict: A BREATH OF FRESH AIR

There’s much more to be said but I’ll leave these handful of points for your perusal. A plus.

 

Categories
Campaign 2013

Dogs of War (DeLorean Unveiled)

They say that a week is a long time in politics. In that case twenty years must seem like an eternity. Churchill is often attributed the quote “Show me a young Conservative and I’ll show you someone with no heart, show me an old Liberal and I’ll show you someone with no brains.” Time and experience changes people. Under normal circumstances and outside the partisan fog of war it is considered normal to weigh your options every time an election comes around. Of course your own political preferences and outlook might give you an automatic preference towards one party or another but there is no shame in changing.

It’s not change for change’s sake that I am talking about though. That’s plain stupid. Sadly many voters will be voting for change for change’s sake next Saturday and, yes, I do think that it is plain stupid to do so. What I am referring to is the possibility of having evolving politics and ideas, of having the opportunity to compare parties who in turn have evolved their ideas and projects. That is important for a healthy representative democracy. That voters get to choose between parties healthily vying for their trust by proposing good plans for the nation, its citizens, their rights – that is healthy.

For a long time this blog has advocated the idea that our bipartisan system is geared to becoming a race to the bottom. It is a race to mediocrity that promotes populism, contradictory promises to everyone and everything and – because of the inevitable entrenchment of a political elite – it weaves an intricate web of inter-dependent interests that are conducive to corruption. In short the PLPN method sanctioned and strengthened by the constitutional amendments that kicked off with a Government White Paper in 1990 is wrought in such a way as to kill off (or greatly minimise) any terzo incomodo and strengthen the stranglehold of the bipartisan duality.

The combination of a series of amendments since 1987 (1987, 1996, 2007) to the sections of the constitution has continued to strengthen the PL and PN positions to the detriment of a possible third party. This has been one of the main criticisms directed from this blog – particularly at the phenomenon called “The Wasted Vote” that ends up killing all hope for potential third party voters on the eve of elections. It’s simple really – the PL or PN spinmasters wait till the last moment and then shoot the “you’re wasting your vote” argument : from Austin Bencini’s traditional “constitutional” article to Daphne Caruana Galizia’s “setting yourselves up as objects of hate”. It’s the death knell for AD.

Back in 1991 when the proposed amendments were still under discussion we had one particular columnist who got rather hot under the collar about these changes. In an impeccably written article the columnist presciently summarised all that was wrong with the system and even managed to predict one of the inherent dangers of the system. I copied out the second half of the article yesterday as a guest post under the name DeLorean (smart geeks among you will have recognised the car from Back to the Future). You can see the full article here in “Voting like it’s 1992” – actually it’s the second half of the original article, the first half was full of not so kind descriptions of Austin Gatt and Eddie Fenech Adami.

The whole philosophy of the importance of electing a third party to government is encapsulated in the second half of this article under the subtitle “The Argument”. Gems of thought such as the importance of representation over and above governability leap at you conspicuously. The article includes a prescient worry:

What if we find ourselves, in 20 years’ time with the choice of two absolutely disreputable political parties? What if the Nationalist Party disintegrates into the kind of sagging, soggy, useless mess of the Sixties… a heap that gave rise to the joke “Tgħajjatx għax tqajjem il-gvern!”? What is a traditionally Nationalist supporter supposed to do… vote for the Labour Party, vote for a mess, or not vote at all?

20 years from 1991 … that’s just two years off the mark, yet it is still so very tangibly relevant. The complaint by the author is clear – are we to end up with a Hobson’s Choice? A gun against our head? Are we to end up being blackmailed with the haunting idea of the “wasted vote”? A Daniel I say, a Daniel.

Most intriguingly one of the most telling paragraphs remains the following – and this mainly because of the author’s subsequent metamorphosis and absorption into part of the Leviathan that is so aptly described:

Third parties cannot be created out of nothing. They must grow, and their growth must be spawned by a real need within the people. Even if this need exists – and there is no doubt at all, it does – all growth will be warped by Malta’s all-pervasive fear and ignorance, which has effects similar to that of radiation on a growing foetus. Through this fear and ignorance, the Nationalist Party and the Labour Party survive, thrive and continue to grow.

Fear and ignorance. We were so close weren’t we? Fear and loathing we described it, plus an incredible propensity to abuse of ignorance. 20 years down the line and we have observed a campaign imbued with fear and thriving on ignorance and misinformation. Half truths are mixed with political assassination of the cruellest kind and yet even when you work out your sums and eliminate the two possibilities – the two podgy kids on the see-saw – you find out that your remaining hope has been nipped in the bud. Yep. the wasted vote argument. Not only that. The moment you boldly announce that you are determined to be represented because governance is not the be all and end all, because representation is just as important – that is when the dogs of war are unleashed.

Which is where the sweet irony hits home. Yes. It is time to reveal who DeLorean, writing with so much passion against the death knell that was writ into our constitution two decades ago is. Well it is none less than Daphne Caruana Galizia – the passionate put-downer of the third party, currently engaged in a character assassination of Michael Briguglio (last time round it was Dirty Harry) through a mixture of half-truths and the usual dose of “wasted vote stupids”.

As I said in the beginning, there is nothing wrong with change in a person. Daphne has already commented on this article this week : “Probably filed with the article describing Eddie Fenech Adami as a villager lawyer in a folder called ‘Mistakes I made at 25’. There are a lot of them. Fortunately, I had the good sense not to persist in error.” (it was actually the same article but she has to feign that it is not important so she would not remember would she). Probably the folder of “Mistakes I made at 45” includes backing JPO to the hilt in the 2008 election and actually voting him number 1.

People change. Daphne has every right to change her opinion about what makes the country tick. It makes you wonder what the motivation of this change is though. From a passionate advocate for third party systems to a staunch defender of the PLPN dichotomy.  I do hope this is not considered “calling names by the AD crowd”. It is sad though to see the transition from what was evidently a motivated young liberal to a dog of war baying for Briguglio’s head – and why? Because voting Ad will get you Labour according to Daphne. But Daphne…

Alternattiva is not the crux of the problem. The hypothetical small party is. Many people might disapprove of Alternattiva, but they should not be so shortsighted as to assume that they will disapprove of any other political party that might grow out of unrest and discontent over the next two or three generations. We must be unselfish enough to think beyond the next two or three generations. We must be honest enough to admit that we do not want our children to live their adult lives as we are now living ours. We must stop thinking in terms of our immediate future, because many of us will live for a great deal longer than that, ….

Unselfish. Honest. At what point did those kind of values stop being important, I wonder. Still, I found a good maxim in that article, it fits my philosophy perfectly, and it seems of many others:

Governability is not the Holy Grail, and we should not allow the government to sell it to us as such.

And we won’t Daphne. We won’t.

 

 

Categories
Politics Rubriques

I.M. Jack – Monday’s Highlights

Factitious parties and reconstruction

The nationalist party has as yet not imploded but we still hear of calls for its reconstruction. Back in May 2008 we were penning a little post about the Labour party and the dangers of Clique & Factions and we are today still witnessing the problems that our parties face when factions within them (even one-man-factions) decide to stir the proverbial faeces. Democratically speaking we are now witnessing the obvious corollary of all that J’accuse was warning about last election.

Voting for our political parties in this day and age involves making specific choices about the persons you are voting into parliament. When the political parties, operating under the blessing of an electoral system doctored in favour of the Diceyan bipartite mantra, fail to put into place the necessary safeguards to ensure that all candidates are party kosher (because they prefer votes to value) then it is only a matter of time before the merde hits the ventilateur.

We spoke of this in Wasted a bit more than a year ago. Then it was the manner that party representatives purported to represent the great unwashed in the divorce affair that jarred. Nowadays we have the Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando witch hunt. We can never tire of pointing out how right this blog was in 2008 to emphasise the blatant anomaly in the PN manner of doing politics. Backing anyone and anything to the hilt simply because it helps bring votes in the massive showdown of GonziPN vs Sant only gets you into government. Once you are in government you will have to face the consequences of getting “anyone” elected on your side.

We were told at the time that we were irresponsible idiots who never grew up and who were setting ourselves up as objects of hate simply because we advocated a position that people  vote for quality and content and not simply on the lines of party backing and pretty faces (though some would beg to differ on the latter count).

Great brains like Richard Cachia Caruana were busy transforming Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando into a vote grabbing machine – converting the unpalatable cosmetic dentist into a sugar-free sweetener who had become a “victim” of “nasty Alfred Sant”. The gullible ones swallowed it all – hook, line and sinker – and rushed to the ballot box to vote JPO #1 – thus shafting this unpleasant, inconsistent and hopelessly garishly naive politician upon us. Us of the wasted votes. We who had screamed and shouted irresponsibly for the PN to get its act together and to build a foundation of candidates centred around the basic values that had got it through a decade of reform.

Well. You reap what you sow I guess and Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando has been one hell of a harvest for the PN to handle. (picture: J’accuse Personality of the Year Award as depicted by Bertu in Bertoons). The reconstruction must perforce start from the realisation that some very very wrong choices were made.

sevenorlandos

 

Tennis worth watching

Watching Andy Murray collapse into tears after being defied at the last hurdle at SW19 by the greatest player tennis has seen must have been the most moving moment this weekend. Second best at Wimbledon earns you £560 k not to mention the added branding income that Murray will see flowing his way given his immediate boost in the “world recognition” stakes. Tennis stars earn more money off the pitch once they become a recognisable icon and yesterday’s match meant just that for the Scot from Dunblane. Roger Federer’s net worth, to give an alien example, is around $200 million but we are talking here about a man who has broken all sorts of records in the gentlemen’s sport.

Back to Murray – all this talk about money meant nothing to him yesterday afternoon. His name was not being engraved in the Olympus of Wimbledon greats and he has still not won a grand slam. Sure, he will not be having any cash flow problems for a while but that is beside the point. His is a battle to achieve, one that is ultimately not measured in pounds, shillings and pence but in victories and performance. Values that are fast being lost in today’s world – and not necessarily the sporting one.

Democracy’s value added

Libya has gone off and done the democratic thing – electing its own government and leaders. This may not be the time for the Western world to shout success: the real proof of a democracy lies not in the electing but in the democratic governance. Saturday night saw fireworks in the Libyan sky as the end of voting was celebrated. A 60% turnout seems to be the agreed figure and a liberal alliance is expected to trump the Islamist party this time round. Government will in all probability be by coalition given that over 100 parties were formed to contest these first open elections. Democracy battles to outwit any possibility of civil unrest that would favour the more unstable sides of society. Meanwhile Assad is holding on to power in Syria – claiming that he has the backing of the people.

Seems like yesterday when a bespectacled Colonel speaking to the BBC  yelled “The people… they love me all“.

 That uncanny conviction that ego-maniacs seem to have that everybody loves them. It seems to be so bloody contagious.

 

Categories
Politics

The Cantankerous Voter

The leader in this week’s Economist advocates a form of financial federalism as a sort of Plan B to combat the economic crisis. Europe has moved far from the “deepening vs widening” debates of the mid-nineties. After Maastricht the questions being asked were mainly with regard to the various geometries that the next step of integration would take and how far would states go in relinquishing sovereignty to a higher order. Then came the euro.

The launching of the single currency was meant to be a grand step in the wider project of integration. A european construct that had been built on the foundations of economic incentives and integration could not but rejoice in having its own single currency. One interesting remark in the Economist appreciation of the causes behind the euro crisis was with regard to this very moment of crystallisation – when Europe got its own coin.

In fact the euro came around a good sixty years into the roller-coaster ride that was gradual european unification. For most of that sixty years Europe had been built on the safe assumption that the project was one very good way to avoid the return to the bad habits of internecine warfare that had plagued the old continent from time immemorial. More importantly the constitutive demos of this project could be sold a series of integrative steps without having too much of a say in it.

The post-war generation did not need reminding that having the Germans and French sitting at a table discussing mutual improvement was much much more preferable than Blitzkrieg and the travails of la resistance. Up until the early nineties this meant an institutional construct that had glaringly obvious deficiencies in its democratic structures. The symbiosis between Council, Commission and Parliament together with the occasional wink from the court in Luxembourg delivered results – top among which was the huge relief that this was an ever growing club of nations NOT GOING TO WAR WITH EACH OTHER.

By the time the euro was launched the face of the demos had changed radically. Old threats and bogeys had either been long forgotten or been dropped along the way. 1989 and the disappearance of the big menace behind the Iron Curtain were also factors that distanced the link between the benefits of mutual cooperation on the one hand and the benefits of cooperation on the other.

The euro was born on the brink of world economic meltdown. A post 9/11 US was also reeling from its failed financial bets and the European crisis followed suit in the second half of the first decade of the 21st century. Europe’s baby was not exactly a crowd pleaser. The demos could only associate the euro with trouble – trouble of the worst kind that takes money out of pockets, destroys jobs and voraciously devours any dreams of prosperity,

The challenge of the European union and its leaders is to continue to sell the project for its benefits beyond the facile association with euro tinged misery. From Greece to France to Malta whether the demos will be able to relatch to a promise and a new european dream will depend on how the plan for the future is revealed and sold.

More importantly it depends on whether there is a plan that involves the kind of cooperation and integration that made the first half-century of European union such an outstanding success…. in spite of the feelings of doom that are all-pervading right now.