Opposition in final appeal against ‘placing local council elections on the backburner’

The Opposition has launched a last-ditch plea for the government to scrap its plans to start holding local council elections every five years, in tandem with the European Parliament elections.

Speaking during a Consideration of Bills parliamentary committee, Opposition leader Simon Busuttil noted that the legal amendments will effectively scrap the next round of 34 local elections set for 2017.

“This legal amendment will demean democracy, particularly since no government in Malta’s history has previously amended election laws without first obtaining full consensus from the Opposition,” he said. “The last time there was political disagreement over elections was after the 1981 election.”

Opposition MP Chris Said warned that the new law would effectively relegate local council elections to the backseat, with the public spotlight shining squarely on the European Parliament elections.

“Experience has shown us that local council elections always take the backseat whenever they are held in tandem with other elections,” Said said in a passionate speech. “People hardly discussed the local council elections at all; this will no longer be the exception but the rule.”

The former justice minister claimed that the government’s insistence on cancelling 2017 was because it wanted to avoid another set of elections before the next general election, due to fear that the PN has halved the gap between the two parties.

Justice minister Owen Bonnici dismissed this latter argument, noting that the Labour Party won 54% of the vote in this year’s batch of local council elections.

He suggested that the lack of political consensus was due to blunt refusal by the Opposition to agree with the government.

“The Labour Opposition had agreed with the previous government’s plans to extend local council terms from three to four years, but this Opposition is against extending them to five years.

“The Opposition has a right to object, but the government also the right to take decisions. No particular party has a monopoly over political consensus, and political consensus doesn’t mean that I have to bow down to the Opposition’s rejection of the Bill.”

‘Only two EU countries hold local elections every five years’

Shadow justice minister Jason Azzopardi said that only two out of the 28 EU member state, hold local elections every five years, with the remaining 26 holding them every four years or under. Bonnici said that he couldn’t verify his counterpart’s claims, to which Azzopardi retorted that the government should have conducted a thorough comparative analysis with other EU countries befotre proposing the amendments.

Azzopardi brushed aside arguments that the amendments will cut down on local council election costs, that rise up to €3 million per election, arguing that “ministry consultants alone cost the public purse €3.4 million every year”.

Opposition MPs also warned that cancelling the 2017 local elections would contradict the Labour government’s own decision to grant local election voting rights to 16-year-olds.

"While 16 year olds who were eligible to vote in 2017 will not be able to do so, the next set of 16 year olds will be able to vote in 2019 and in all subsequent local elections," Bonnici said. "We could either have held the next set of local elections in 2017 and grant half the local councils [those voted in 2015] a mere three-year term, or postpone them to 2019 and grant the other half of local councils [those voted in 2012] a one-off seven-year term. We decided to go for the latter option."