Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1161926
LET'S try a little experiment, shall we? Cast your minds back to 2003 – the year of the EU referendum/general election – and imagine for a moment what might have happened had things turned out differently. Not in the sense that 'Part- nership won' – because, let's face it, it was (and still is) impossible to predict the consequences of a 'No-Deal Deal' with the EU, of the kind Alfred Sant was proposing at the time. No, in the sense that Malta did indeed vote to join the EU in 2003… but, for whatever reason, never actually joined. It could very easily have happened, you know. For starters, let's not forget that it took an election, held three months later, to actually seal Malta's accession the follow- ing year. As I recall, the No campaign didn't accept the result of what it kept insist- ing was merely a 'consulta- tive' referendum; and while its core argument – i.e., that abstentions should be counted as 'Nos' – was clearly flawed, from a purely technical angle it is true that the referendum, on its own, was never legally binding to begin with. As such, if the Labour Party won the 2003 election – or even if Eddie won all the same, but then suffered a mild concussion which altered his opinions about EU member- ship – the incoming govern- ment would have been fully within its legal rights to just ignore the EU referendum result. But of course, referendum results are things you ignore at your own risk; and to do it just three months later would be the equivalent of simply telling the entire electorate to go stuff itself, and to hell with the consequences. Unsurprisingly, then, the electorate responded in kind: delivering exactly the same verdict in the 2003 election - 52%/48% - as it had in the referendum three months ear- lier (which, I suppose, was just another way of politely telling Alfred Sant where he could stuff his Partnership proposal instead.) But for the moment, let's stick to actual history only up until the 2003 election result. Malta voted to join the EU in March; and in May, the pro- accession party was comfort- ably returned to power in a general election, confirming the referendum result. All that remained was for Eddie Fenech Adami and Joe Borg to sign the Accession Treaty on the dotted line (which they did, the following April); but, for the purposes of this experiment… let's pretend that that just never happened at all; that even to- day – 16 years after voting to join the EU – Malta was still a non-EU country. Again, there are any number of historical permutations that could have yielded that result. Earlier I joked about Eddie Fenech Adami 'chang- ing his mind'… well, stranger things have been known to happen. In the mid-1950s, Dom Mintoff shifted his posi- tion from 'Integration with Britain', to 'Britain Go Home': just like that, in the blink of an eye. And only a few years ago, I seem to remember a young, ambitious One TV journalist who was actively campaign- ing (along with the rest of his party) against EU member- ship, in accordance with the Alfred Sant script. Whatever happened to him in the end, I wonder? Oh look, there he is: sitting in the Prime Minister's chair in Castile, and behaving for all the world as if he actu- ally invented the EU himself... Honestly, who would ever have guessed? But there are other, more re- alistic ways it could have hap- pened. We all saw, a few years later, how Lawrence Gonzi's grip on power was under- mined by a handful of rebel- lious backbencher MPs…. to the extent that, at one point, he even extended Parliament's summer recess, to avoid the possibility of facing a vote of confidence. (Sounds vaguely familiar, doesn't it? But more of this later.) With hindsight, Eddie Fenech Adami was never particularly prone to back- bencher revolts, or anything similar. But the same cannot be said for the PN as a whole: it was, in fact, a backbencher revolt against George Borg Olivier that had propelled Eddie to the leadership in the first place. It is by no means incon- ceivable, then, that history could have repeated itself. It is widely known that (future President) Censu Tabone was initially sceptical about the whole EU idea; reportedly, it took a little of Guido De Mar- co's 'politics of persuasion' to get him to see the light. Just imagine that Guido had failed; and that Censu Tabone was not alone in his initial Eu- roscepticism. And there you have it. Eddie Fenech Adami might have faced a similar situation after the 2003 elec- tion… possibly even to the extent of losing his majority. Even more specifically… Malta's Parliament might, under those circumstances, have rejected his celebrated 'deal' ('il-pakkett', remember?) with the EU: not once, not twice, but three times in quick succession… OK, by now you will surely have realised where all this is heading. With only a few minor alterations, the above scenario is almost identical to the one facing the United Kingdom right now. Three years ago, the people of Britain voted in a referen- dum on EU membership; and as far as I can see, the verdict was pretty straightforward. Brexit won, Remain lost… and interestingly enough, by a margin that was almost exactly the same as ours (only the other way round). Yet today – three whole years later – the UK is still an EU member state: partly because Britain's House of Commons has since then rejected Theresa May's 'deal' with the EU… not once, not twice, but three times in quick succession. Hence that little experiment we're conducting. How would we have reacted, had the same thing happened here in 2003? What would the 52% majority have had to say ,about a 48% minority that simply hijacked the future they had voted for – 'for themselves, for their children', remember? – on the basis that it just doggedly re- fused to ever accept the result of a democratic vote that did not go its own way? To be perfectly honest, I shudder to think. We came close enough to all-out vio- lence in 2003… when both 'Yes' and 'No' campaigners took to the streets at the same time, to celebrate a victory they both claimed as their own. Can you just imagine what (if anything) would even be left of Malta today… if that act of defiance was extended beyond the subsequent elec- tion, with the result that we never actually joined Europe at all? Nor is this the only similar- ity. Just like our own referen- dum was somehow 'won' by both sides… both sides in the Brexit debate seem to think they are representing the in- terests of democracy itself. Like Malta's 'Yes' voters in 2003, today's Brexiteers are defending a legitimate, demo- cratic victory at the polls, against a minority which – not unlike Sant's Partnership campaign – is actively trying to subvert the referendum 24 OPINION maltatoday | SUNDAY • 1 SEPTEMBER 2019 Raphael Vassallo It ' s a threat to democracy, but not as we know it...