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AD chairperson Harry Vassallo has a new challenge ahead of him: four MPs or it’s the end of his leadership. It’s a tall order
Seems like global warming is leaving its toll on the Greens, at least on the domestic version in the form of Alternattiva Demokratika.
It’s probably the unbearable heatwave that is making its chairman, Harry Vassallo, so suddenly impatient, to the point of saying he’s tired of being grateful for things that he’s been waiting to happen for ages; to the extent that he’s putting his leadership on the line unless he gets elected to parliament – not one, not two MPs, but three to four, he says.
 As people from civil society take to the streets, with unlikely campaigners springing out of the largely pale blue disillusioned voting public, Vassallo finds himself flanked by NGOs on the frontline, but little does he manage to break through their perceptions of AD as just another pressure group, not really a party that offers political leadership.
“It’s definitely in people’s perceptions; one of the greatest challenges is to change political culture,” Vassallo says. “That leads people to expect a complete solution and a complete alternative, because this is what they have been used to. Unless a political party is able to be the next government, they do not consider it to be a political party. This is not the case anywhere else in Europe. So our challenge is not only on the level ideas but on the level of changing a whole culture, it’s a great challenge for us. We have never wanted to be in government on our own, that’s not what we have in mind at all. In fact our main reason for existing is to prevent anybody being the political sultan, which has been our experience for the last 40 years.”
Great challenge indeed, considering the dwindling figures it is getting at the ballot in national elections, with the latest fiasco being 0.7 per cent of the national vote in 2003, when Malta was joining the EU. Granted, all the odds were against it, though AD lived up to its democratic convictions when it turned down Fenech Adami’s offer of a seat in parliament, the speaker’s seat actually, in exchange for not contesting the elections.
In exchange, it got an eleventh hour broadside from the PN leader by scaring people from voting even number two to AD, threatening that such a vote would jeopardise Malta’s accession into the EU.
Vassallo’s magnanimity in campaigning for a number two vote only resulted in one of the most public political acts of backstabbing ever from the ruling Nationalist party.
“The 0.7 per cent we got in the last election was certainly generated by our campaign; I don’t think anybody believes that was the level of our support in 2003 when we made a campaign saying that we would accept the number 2 vote, giving the number 1 to somebody else. The next year we had 23,000 votes, 9.4 per cent – OK it was a European Parliament election but it was unheard of, a political earthquake. I also look at our local councils results, where we get around 5 to 6 per cent, which are very creditable results for a Green party. We’re the fifth largest Green party in Europe, so we must not expect too much. If we wanted to be a Labour party we would be a great success, if we wanted to be a conservative party we would also have a great success – we are a Green party. Our target is not to get 50 per cent.”
Getting 50 per cent of votes is not Harry’s target, but, it turns out, his target is equally sky high, and despite its improbability he is dead serious about it.
“Three or four people in parliament,” he says.
Can you say that again?
“Yes. Up to four people in Parliament. We can elect people from anywhere.”
Under your leadership?
“Yes. I hope so. I think this is going to be the best election we’ll ever have.”
Do you seriously believe you’ll reach that target?
“It would be very good.”
Of course it would be very good but how are you going to achieve it?
“Even with the present electoral system, that’s not the problem. One is the self brainwashing by people in the media and the horrendous prejudice on our access, particularly to television. If we look at our 2004 results, that was also the result of our presence in the media before the 2003 EU referendum.”
So anything short of three to four elected to parliament…
“Would be a disappointment,” he interjects.
What would lead you to resign?
“If we don’t get into parliament next time round I would resign. Eighteen years is enough to give to one’s country.”
Aiming high is never bad but it must be disappointing for Vassallo not to manage to win over the disenchanted voters when his party should be having a field day.
“The problem is that we’re not on an equal playing field. Although we participate fully in politics, we make ourselves heard, we conduct our own campaigns, and we are not on people’s minds simply because we are not on the news, particularly on TV. Very few people read newspapers and that’s where our main presence is. People not only don’t know our opinion on various issues, they don’t even know we’re there. That’s a major problem. Some even think we’re Greenpeace.”
Vassallo always complains about not having access to the media but his party had a radio station that is only dishing out songs and cheap adverts. What happened to Capital Radio?
“We’re still related to that station but we had a problem with it because the basic costs, which is the licence fee and the transmission fee for the master antenna, meant that it had to be run on commercial lines.”
For AD, as with every radio station broadcasting nationally, it’s an annual cost of Lm7,000 – Lm5,000 to the Broadcasting Authority in licence fees and another Lm2,000 to transmit from the master antenna.
“For it to be run on commercial lines it was extremely prejudiced for the station to be directly associated with us, and we found ourselves in an extremely irritating and difficult situation,” Vassallo said. “We have in fact transferred the licence to the cooperative we had set up – Media Co-op – it was our radio station that could not put forward our ideas.”
Isn’t that an awful loss of an opportunity?
“It was extremely frustrating to find that you cannot use your own media the way you would like to, because of the commercial restraints. We would have very much welcomed the possibility to run the radio station on a voluntary basis as we had run our newspaper and be able to speak freely. We have experienced many times the pressure of the various people we had to confront who withdrew the advertising. When you have people employed and whose families depend on the advertising revenue we found ourselves restricted. In practical terms we did not have a radio station. As long as the Broadcasting Authority sets up this system where your licence fee determines that you have to be a commercial radio station then this talk of pluralism is nonsense.”
Another failed target for Vassallo is to collect 30,000 signatures to be able to call a referendum on rent reform. He had to collect them by July last year, but by August he had only collected one-third of the target he set for himself. Now he doesn’t even want to say how many signatures he has managed to collect since then.
You had said you would collect them last year.
“Well we hoped so.”
You’ve clearly failed in your own target.
“Yes we’ve failed in our target, but it doesn’t mean that we give up. We never do.”
You said you would pre-empt Dolores Cristina and the government in being ahead of them with your campaign.
“No I said we would present a paper, and we did. We are definitely ahead of her (Cristina) because we’ve presented our proposals and she did absolutely nothing.”
So what’s your new target now? When will you present 30,000 signatures?
“When we have them.”
Vassallo continued in all seriousness. “There’s no rush,” he said.
Last year you had a rush, you set a target and you missed it. “Well last year we wanted to raise pressure to collect the signatures as fast as possible. It is clear that we will not be reaching our target immediately and we are continuing our campaign in a rather slow fashion. But we will definitely get there, and there is no time limit set by the law.”
Well of course the law doesn’t care when you present your signatures.
“No no no, in many countries you have a time limit to collect signatures for a referendum. In our case we can take as long as we like.”
That sounds like political failure, just promising to procrastinate after raising expectations among landowners that you would be pushing rent reforms.
“Definitely come September we expect to hold a meeting and pool the resources and energies of people who have an interest in this matter.”
Ideologically this issue is a bit tricky for AD, which is fronting a landowners’ battle, while they must have also overestimated public support and underestimated the logistics and energies needed to conduct a massive campaign.
“We tend to contradict stereotypes,” Vassallo says. “If you look at our core values, it is the rational use of resources, and when you consider the wider picture, our rent reform campaign is not only about controlling property rent, but it was also our way to use the only tool available to us, that is the referendum, to change the situation and lever the government into addressing the wider picture, not only in rent but also unused, horded property. When you have a vast number of unused properties while prices skyrocket we have a very dangerous economic situation and a social situation that is untenable. The government refuses to address it.
“In a recent debate in parliament the prime minister tried to corner the leader of the Opposition into saying that he was seeking a hoarding tax. It was very disappointing of the prime minister to do that because in fact he put himself in a corner, because it is inevitable that the surplus of properties will have to be addressed, by this administration or the next one or the one after – by cornering the opposition in the short term on this issue he is basically determining that he or his successor leading his party will have to make a U-turn on this. It will not be the first time.”
But going back to those missing 30,000 signatures, the minimum established by law to call a referendum, clearly AD should have found much more support than it has been met with.
“Yes, yes. We have found significant support, we have not concluded.”
Yet you don’t want to divulge the number of signatures.
“No I don’t think it would be wise and I don’t think I want to.”
Are you anywhere near the 30,000 mark?
“Well we still have a nice long way to go, we need to organise our energies to collect them.”
For Vassallo, Eddie Fenech Adami’s presidency has been “very disappointing”.
“He doesn’t have very much more to serve as far as I can see. This presidency is not developing the presidency. I would like to see the presidency as part of our non-existent common ground. The president should be a figure that joins Malta together, that can be a symbol of us all, and I don’t think this president is in a position to do so.”
Vassallo sees voter disenchantment, particularly from the disappointed Nationalists, as partly an angry reaction to the pre-2003 Nationalist propaganda that finances were “fis-sod” – safe and sound. It is also a post-EU feeling of liberation, that of standing up and voicing clear dissent towards the government.
“Many of these have not come to the point where they are actually looking for an alternative,” he admits. “It is something of, not a disappointment; I would say a reality check. When you hear people saying that they won’t vote, their threat not to vote shows they have made their revolution but are still within a one party world. Whereas abroad you have people who are disenchanted with politics in general, this is disappointment with a political party, a wish to hit back at a political party, and yet it does not go beyond the ‘not vote’ stage to say I will look around and vote for somebody else.”
How do you intend to get them to vote for you?
“I think we have to keep making this argument, because if you have gained your freedom or if you think you have gained your freedom, you’ve got to use it. Freedom is one of those things that if you don’t use it you lose it. Nobody can expect or hope for a change by sitting at home and letting other people decide for them.”
On the other hand, Alfred Sant is banking on winning by default, which seems the only factor that could make him electable.
“I think his (Sant’s) successor would have a much greater chance of election. In fact any successor to Sant will have a greater chance of election. He’s determined to stay on, and the party seems unable to solve the crisis of removing him, and it’s doing this at a considerable cost to the party. One because it loses novelty, the opportunity to present a new face, and two because it has a number of people who are disillusioned. This doesn’t mean that the Labour party will definitely lose at the next election, because it can win by default. Unfortunately that is the way the Labour party seems to want it to be, because they seem to make no significant effort to provide an alternative that is attractive, which is inspired and inspiring.”
Given that you don’t stand eye to eye with the Nationalists at the moment, will you ever be able to form a coalition with Labour?
“We are in the process, and it has taken 18 years, to make these alliances and coalitions not only possible but also a necessity, and bringing the other two parties under the 50 per cent mark looks like a completely probable result in the next election. Bringing them under the 50 per cent mark and electing someone to parliament would make this completely necessary. I think that we have the equipment to deal with the other parties. I don’t think that they have the mental framework to even consider coalitions. Their whole structure, their whole design for the past 40 years, was to be the government alone. They are not equipped as every other party in Europe is, to speak with one’s adversaries. For us it is obviously a necessity.”
Vassallo admits he is, really, getting impatient.
“Very much so, yes,” he replies to my last question. With a benchmark clearly set now, and let it be repeated here: three to four Green MPs in Parliament, he sees the next election as way of getting down to business.
“I want it (the election) over and done with so that we can start working. In parliament. Hopefully.”
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