The past few days have succeeded in destroying what little faith we may still have had in the Maltese political system.  The nation was treated to the revolting spectacle of the PN leader blatantly attempting to gaslight the electorate, brazenly attempting to pass off a cynical perversion of the electoral system as “self-sacrifice”, even heroism.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that the two main parties came up with their self-serving, cynical “positive discrimination” plan to give themselves extra seats in parliament to ‘their’ women, while denying them to third parties and independents, the PN has now unashamedly proven that the whole exercise was nothing but a sham.

Anyone who truly believes there should be more women in parliament would be bending over backwards to ensure any woman who gets the opportunity to win a seat should take that opportunity, not applaud her handing it over to a man instead. And they should certainly not be praising this action when the result is that she snatches the chance away from another woman as a result. This would be distasteful at any time, but it’s even more so after an election that saw just four women elected straight off.

The sly manipulation demonstrated by the PN Leader who presided over the most cataclysmic defeat ever in the history of the Nationalist Party, as he attempted to dupe the public that Janice Chetcuti was acting out of honour in her decision not to contest the casual election that could have seen her elected to parliament on her own steam, was a Rubicon moment for the shattered party.

In making that decision, to exploit an already compromised ‘gender corrective mechanism’ purportedly aimed at increasing female participation in parliament in order to boost the number of male representatives – in the meantime actually decreasing the number of women there would otherwise be in parliament – the PN has shown that it is untrustworthy, self-serving and devious.

Of course, it’s not surprising that a party led by a man who deliberately and knowingly failed to pay his taxes for almost the whole of his working life would sink to these sordid tricks to try and keep the wreckage afloat for a little while longer, but the collusion of Chetcuti is beyond the pale.

As she very well knows, by “sacrificing” her right to be elected through the casual election process, she makes room for a man to win that seat. By deciding instead to enter parliament via the “positive discrimination” route, she is actually blocking another woman from taking up that seat.

That a female politician would agree to help keep another woman out of parliament, a parliament already desperately short of female representation, is unbelievable.

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Grech and Chetcuti are treating the electorate as fools – concurrently revealing an almost mind-boggling degree of arrogance, especially after the PN’s disastrous election result. Democracy means accepting the people’s choice, not ignoring, manipulating and twisting it simply to keep the PN wreckage afloat for just a little while longer.

Janice Chetcuti herself seems to have a perverted definition of what it means to be elected by the people to represent them in parliament.  She may want to consider signing up for a crash course immediately if she truly wants to serve the nation as an MP. Her loyalty, first and foremost, should be to the nation, and not to her party.

This idea that party allegiance ‘naturally’ trumps anything and everything is the root of much of the endemic rot in Maltese politics. A political party is only as good as the people running it at any given moment in time. Nobody “owes” allegiance to a party that would not only pervert parliamentary processes for their own gain but would also stand up and attempt to deceive the nation into thinking there was something heroic about it.

Up to a few years ago, the idea of not voting in the general elections seemed scandalously remiss. Sure, some people used withdrawal as a form of protest, but somehow it came across as a pointless, toothless gesture. The ‘baddies’ would still win. No change ever came about via inaction, after all.

But now, finally, it becomes clear why some people choose not to vote. Why on earth should they bother, when the political parties have absolutely no qualms about then ignoring their votes, exploiting and manipulating every loophole and every mechanism, to get the result they wanted, regardless of what the electorate has very clearly told them?

This decision by the PN shows it up to be dishonest and manipulative. That the electorate, in its vast majority, already believed the PN is no longer trustworthy was made clear by the election results. That it would openly and arrogantly confirm that fact barely two weeks later simply proves the electorate was right in its assessment.

There’s going to be one woman less than there might have been in parliament thanks to Bernard Grech. Shame on him.