TMID Editorial: A saturated Parliament
In an interview with The Malta Independent last week, Speaker Anglu Farrugia spoke about a range of different topics - one of which being the number of MPs that Malta currently has.Malta currently has 79 MPs in its Parliament - 65 elected (5 from eac
In an interview with The Malta Independent last week, Speaker Anglu Farrugia spoke about a range of different topics - one of which being the number of MPs that Malta currently has.
Malta currently has 79 MPs in its Parliament - 65 elected (5 from each of the country's 13 electoral districts), two more elected as a result of a proportionality mechanism, and the remaining 12 added to the ranks due to a gender corrective mechanism.
"I don't agree with it personally," Farrugia told this newspaper when the subject was brought up during the interview. "I'm one of those who believes that to cut clientelism and make politics more serious on a national level rather than a district level that Malta and Gozo shouldn't be more than four or five electoral districts," he explained.
"You will cut out clientelism. I used to be elected from Mosta, so you automatically remain somewhat tied to that district. Even if you resist - and I used to resist a lot - you still have people who will say that they will not vote for you if you don't give them something," he continued.
Right now, Malta has an MP for every 6,532 voters and far more MPs in number than other similarly sized European countries like Luxembourg (which has 60 MPs, one for every 10,579 voters) and Cyprus (which has 56 MPs, one for every 16,000 voters).
"I think 45 to 50 MPs is enough... Cyprus is bigger than us and has less MPs. There is something that doesn't hold up," Farrugia said.
He noted that both major political forces - the Labour-led government and the Nationalist-led Opposition - were happy with the reform, but he wasn't.
"A model that cuts clientelism to create a more focused parliament, together with the right to be full-time will create a parliament which is more functional like in other small countries with this system," he said.
Farrugia in many ways is absolutely correct. Parliament has never been this bloated, and without meaningful reforms to impact other things such as the answering of parliamentary questions, whether MPs can choose to be full-time representatives, and even how long an MP's speech can be, the efficiency of how things are done has not particularly increased.
A country as small as Malta should not require so many MPs - as Farrugia rightly pointed out, this merely increases the risk of clientelism and detracts from the overall quality of politics that we should be expecting from our MPs.
We need to have politics on a more national level: reducing the number of electoral districts can have that impact, but of course there are others that can have an impact too.
Obviously this would all require extensive reforms to both the electoral process and the parliamentary process. Given that it seems like neither the government nor opposition are pre-disposed towards agreeing on things as basic as reducing how long an MP can speak for, maybe hoping for such wider-reaching changes is, at least for now, a bridge too far.
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