Stability is the word

I have to admit I am always entertained by the antics and tribulations of Italian politics in general.

More so when situations occur such as the current episode wherein we have watched the two main winners in last March’s general election becoming strange bedfellows in trying to form a government, only for the President of the Republic to first thwart their efforts by objecting to open the door to one of the ministerial appointees and then letting the same appointee in through the window and hey, presto, Italy has a government. For how long?

It all boils down to stability. While a system of multiple parties has its attributes in the exercise of democracy, pluralism and the freedom of expression, it is also a veritable snare many a nation finds difficult to escape from. Coalitions have their value in networking ideas to be presented to the public, but when it comes to sharing power, it is suddenly a question of survival of the fittest. Hence, the greater value of an unimposed biparty system which most often brings quick stability after the inevitable upheaval of a general election, particularly when there is a change of government.

Political stability everywhere offers boundless space for investment, for smoother legislation and governance that is more effective. Lose that or some of it and the consequences are immediate. It is why you would then find, such as we have here scrapping the bottom of their empty barrel, a band of frustrated losers and their hangers-on, among them one or two wearing dog-collars, presumably for spiri- tual reachability, seeking to undermine it. Perhaps the perfect example in our case was the June 2017 general election which carried such dangers, only for the voters to react in the best way they could – opting for continued political stability.

So is there no place for third parties? Of course there is. The question is whether the voters actually warm up to them and their ideas enough to award them with parliamentary seats. Parties with no such voice can hardly make an impact on society. For donkey’s years now, we have had AD, Malta’s own Green Party, but for all their initiative and often genuine concern on issues of national importance, they have only ever had one single MP and he happened to cross the floor of the House rather than being elected on a Green party ticket.

Way back in the Sixties, there was a profusion of ambitious third parties, mostly as a result of the politico-religious dispute that had some feeble-hearted individuals leaving the Church-victimised Malta Labour Party and others with a PN chip on their shoulders forming their little seashells. By 1966, however, they had vanished from the electoral radar. The rest has been more of the same – political parties that had more officials than voters, except a persistent yet despairing AD and, merely a year ago, the fruition of a new PD party made up of two disgruntled ex-Labour MPs. They agreed to form a “grand” coalition with Simon Busuttil’s Nationalist Party only to result in the two ex-Labour MPs winning their seats to the detriment of the senior partner in the coalition. No prize for who guesses which of the two made the wiser move.

The PD achievement, however, had no bearing on the political stability of the country since Joseph Muscat’s government was returned with the bonus of an increased majority. In strictly Opposition terms, the PD remains a PN sore thumb today.

We owe our bi-partite political setting to the UK’s own, of course. Ironically, in Britain itself there was a time in recent history when a chink in the armour was caused by the outcome of a hung parliament. In 2010, Prime Minister David Cameron in fact had to rely on a third party (Liberal Democrat) support at the Commons to survive, a crutch he managed to discard in 2015 before making a quick Brexit himself out of the picture a year later.

Back in the land of pizza and prosecco, however, there have been appeals in the past by none other than Silvio Berlusconi for a bi-partite system that would give Italy the stability it so urgently needs to avoid dragging the rest of the EU with it into a new quagmire. He was not taken seriously and his Playmobil image today belongs to only the fourth political force. Multiple metamorphoses have contributed to the present crisis and few people think another general election could provide the answer.

A Parliament of Tsiprases?

Another admission. I am not one for strict dress codes and have been so since I always found removing my college tie after school hours so exciting, but naive to others. Pre-