The adoption, consolidation, and development – since Malta became an independent state 61 years ago – of the two-party political system, that has eliminated the possibility of enjoying multiple political party representation in the House of Representatives with polyphonic expressions and ideas to consolidate it in only a bipartisan House, has in large measure contributed to the democratisation of slavery.
Maltese citizens – or what is left of them when one subtracts tourists, foreign workers, and irregular immigrants that flock to our shores in the thousands every year to overstress our infrastructure and deplete our finite resources – have been enslaved by the failed two-party political system that has emerged post-independence. Such democratisation of slavery was entrenched in the 1974 ‘republican’ (sic!) constitutional amendments when Malta supposedly became a republic in name but not in substance, a republic based not on equality amongst the citizenry but on constitutionalised and legalised inequality amongst the latter.
The citizenry’s slavery is the result of a democratic electoral process where the two main political parties alternate power amongst themselves with the consequential result being that citizens have lost their rights to participate in the governance of their own state. In 1974, both political parties represented in the House of Representatives conspired and connived to do away, as they eventually did, of that part of the entrenchment provision in the Constitution that mandated a popular referendum for around 40 constitutional provisions to be lawfully altered. This brought with it a bye bye to direct democracy and to republicanism!
Spitefully, Dom Mintoff had labelled the 1964 independence constitution a ‘sham’ constitution but then moved on to approve an unrepublican ‘republican’ sham constitution of his own making that divested the citizenry of their participatory role in amending the most fundamental provisions of the Constitution; the 1974 constitutional amendments shed the review power of the courts in the case of political discrimination by establishing an Employment Commission that does not enjoy the same independence of the courts as to its appointment. To further control the review powers of the courts, a new law was enacted by Act No VIII of 1980 to limit as much as possible judicial review of administrative action. This latter law must have served as the source of inspiration to Bills 143 and 144 of 2025 to amend the planning laws. History repeats itself though governments, alas!, do not learn the lessons of history.
Instead of giving more power to the citizenry to curb dictatorial governmental temptations, the post-republican era has ushered the migration of the citizens’ little power they possessed to the two political parties represented in the House of Representatives. The republic was a sham republic as the principle of equality amongst all citizens was flouted through the consolidation of more power in the ruling class obviously to the detriment of the sovereign citizenry – their electors. As a matter of fact, the citizens are not sovereign at all – they enjoy very little power and are always at the mercy of their own elected representatives. It is the MPs in the House that are sovereign, that amass power, and that decide unilaterally without public consultation the future of Malta, mostly in secret without the public having the least idea of the nature, extent, and subject of their decisions.
Cabinet is the classical example that typifies the secret state. In this sense, the citizenry, through a democratic process – when casting their vote once every five years in a general election – have enslaved themselves to the whims and caprice of the privileged ruling class. The citizenry are at the mercy of the parliamentary class that is entirely manipulated on the government side by the Prime Minister and on the opposition side by the Leader of Opposition through their respective whips and political party apparatchiks.
The indirect system of democracy – precisely because it is representative – has not contributed to a shift of power from the representative to his/her elector. On the contrary, the shift has been in the reverse direction ensuring that the little power the citizenry mustered to keep in check their government migrated to the government. Whilst the citizens are enslaved through the democratic process, hence the democratisation of slavery, central government is becoming more authoritarian, dictatorial, and fascist. This phenomenon is evidenced through the annihilation of the rule of law and the dismantling of overseeing accountable functions of the State so that the oligarchy in government can rule unfettered and abusively with no other organ of the State capable of holding it to account.
If one just looks at the House of Representatives the principle that applies here is that of the winner takes all – as a judge sitting in the court of first instance stated in a court judgement (surely such statement would not have been asserted by the government-appeasing judges sitting on the Constitutional Court that would have never applied such an ‘obnoxious’ or ‘resentful’ principle to the elitist ruling class). The opposition cannot even share in the spoils of its own defeat and partake in the left over crumbs. With a next-to-irrelevant parliamentary opposition in a two-party authoritarian state there is only one organ of the state – the judiciary – that, in theory, can stand up to an arrogant and citizen abusive government together with certain independent offices of state. However, the latter tend to have limited powers, are largely dispossessed of executive power, and are dependent on government or on government-in-the-House to execute their non-binding recommendations. This apart from the fact that these institutions are very much vulnerable when the government flexes its muscles. Whether these offices are filled or remain vacant is very much of a government decision. Remember the recent saga with the appointment of the Ombudsman and the Commissioner for Standards in Public Life that unreasonably dragged on and on for months on end, thanks to the delaying tactics of government. Whether the recommendations of these independent public officers are heeded or shelved, is again a government decision.
Having subdued parliament and the independent offices of State, and having emasculated the citizenry from any form of participation in the decision-making process, the judiciary constitute the only remaining standing stumbling block that needs to be addressed by an authoritarian government. The judiciary is independent on paper but its independence can be very much restricted through, for instance, self-restraint that does not benefit the common good of society but the individual good of an autocratic government. The judiciary, through their government appeasing judicial decisions that are purely and simply intended to accommodate the government of the day, are themselves undermining the rule of law. And by the judiciary I mean in this contribution only the judges sitting on the Constitutional Court.
Take the doctrine of juridical interest where the judiciary – wrongly – apply the private law institute of juridical interest to Public Law disputes. In other words, a doctrine that is intended to protect private individual rights is extended to apply to displace the rights enjoyed by society for its common good. The aim of Public Law is to bring about the common good of society, not the individual private good of one person (whether a minister or public officer) in society over all the rest and to the citizenry’s absolute detriment, even if such person happens to be a legal person in the guise of government. For government is not society. Nor should it be taken for granted that the government invariably acts in the interest of the common good of society, prime ministerial and ministerial platitudes excluded. More often than not, the government acts in the private interest of the political party that has placed it in government. For in Malta there is no strict and watertight constitutionally-mandated separation between government and political party in power. But that phenomenon is nothing new for a fascist state.
Several are the instances that can be quoted to illustrate how Malta continued to move in the direction of an authoritarian, dictatorial, and fascist state that it is impossible to list in this short contribution. Nevertheless, take the case when government removed citizens’ right to request magistrates to investigate corrupt ministers and their sycophants. A further attempt towards fascism is the soon-to-be removal in practice of the right of appeal to the Court of Appeal in development planning cases exercised by environmental non-governmental organisations, local councils, and resident associations to appeal decisions of the government-developers-hijacked Planning Authority.
The government’s urgency to see the two bills enacted into law is not to protect the environment but to line the pockets of ministers, public officers, and developers. These anti-republican measures are intended to shield corrupt ministers and their lackeys from justice or to allow ministers and public officers to indulge in pigging and developers to further cultivate their passion for greed in full disrespect and destruction of the environment or, better, the little that remains of it. Being not in the interest of the common good of society but only in the private individual interest of the anointed few, these measures are in stark contrast with the republican status of Malta. They mar to such an extent that they are actually fascist not republican. But we will soon be called to celebrate 13 December as ‘republic’ day.
Although I do not count myself a fan of British colonialism in Malta, there is one thing that I can surely vouchsafe on all the British military officers who administered Malta over a period of 164 years: none was motivated by pigging and the profit motive. On the contrary, their motivation was service to the British empire, that service to the common good of society that the Maltese politician has not internalised in the last 61 years of our statehood.
The citizenry is enslaved by the ruling class. Less than one per cent of Malta that makes up the total number of ministers and parliamentary secretaries together with their respective back benchers rule, supposedly democratically, with the remaining 99 per cent of the citizenry being totally estranged from government decisions. Yet they call it a democracy. My dictionary labels it an oligarchy. The citizenry, over the years, have seen their governance rights considerably diminished in the decision-making process, not augmented as one would expect with a so-declared progressive government. But, perhaps, I am a legal dinosaur who does not understand that for government, whether of the blue or red inspiration, progress equates the destruction of the environment, the rule of law, and the enslavement of the citizenry.
When it comes to public consultation, the citizens are derided at, publicly made fun of, and taken for a ride by government. A fake public consultation exercise was recently launched in the summer holidays by government on two disastrous planning bills (and accompanying three legal notices that will legalise all development planning irregularities and illegalities in full breach of the rule of law) when everybody knows that these bills will be the laws that government-in-parliament will approve after 15 September. Another concurrent sham public consultation exercise is ongoing in relation to media reform when everybody knows that the Muscat-Abela governments have been deliberately dragging their feet for the last four years or so not to implement at all costs not even one single measure recommended by the Daphne Caruana Galizia Assassination Board of Inquiry report.
The democratisation of slavery means that the citizen-slave is at the total mercy of the capricious and abusive ruler who violates with impunity the rule of law, inculcates a culture of administrative secrecy by persisting in hiding all possible government-damaging information that is requested via freedom of information requests and requests for information lodged by the free media, fails to reply to parliamentary questions notwithstanding the Speaker’s continuous prodding to ministers to respect the parliamentary opposition, treats the opposition with disdain by not placing on the agenda of the House its motions for discussion, ostracises the opposition rendering it incapable of carrying out its constitutional parliamentary functions, appoints persons to occupy various offices of state not on the basis of meritocracy but on the basis of party allegiance, and persists in its quest to dismantle the remaining effective accountability mechanisms that still exist on the statute book.
See how the human right that the Maltese enjoyed since the times of King Tom (1812) not to be detained by the police for more than 48 hours was trampled upon and doubled in the case of certain serious crimes. Quite a regressive and fascist measure intended to bring about a police state in Malta when viewed in the light of other reactionary measures that government has embarked upon within the realm of human rights abuse with the complicity of the judiciary sitting in the Constitutional Court who enjoy an abysmal record of losing 9 cases out of 10 before the European Court of Human Rights.
Even the judiciary has a finger in the pie of human rights abuse for it has failed miserably in its constitutional and conventional duty of securing human rights to the citizen-slave. Possibly Malta might top or be second runner in human rights abuse in the Council of Europe’s 46 member states. Surely not a record for our judiciary to be proud of! And yet, nothing happens; nobody is held accountable, human rights infringements notwithstanding. We have learnt to live with these serious infringements as we have learnt to live with COVID following the vaccine. All is business as usual … whilst awaiting the next humiliating condemnation by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg to be delivered. The time to blush has passed by quite some time ago. The judiciary have normalised this abysmal record and it has now become a matter of routine for them, of no significant perturbation.
The corollary to the democratisation of slavery is the inversely proportional augmentation of absolute unfettered and abusive power. This is a phenomenon that is evidenced in other countries, not only in Malta, that – like us – are led by a fascist right-wing government. I had innocently thought that slavery both in Malta and abroad was abolished. How wrong I was! Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! I admit that I failed to realise how, since independence, the pseudo democratisation of Malta has contributed not to its emancipation or progress but to the citizenry’s enslavement by a despotic oligarchy that is dead set not to relinquish power in favour of the citizenry.
Leo Tolstoy once wrote that the root of all evil is the state. Geoffrey Chaucer, earlier in time, affirmed that the root of all evil is money or greed. Perhaps today a more fundamental root of all evil in Malta , at least, is the political party – the source of all political maladies.
Kevin Aquilina is Professor of Law, Faculty of Laws, University of Malta