Referenda Season

The Malta Independent 

This is the referenda season. In the short space of one week, three national referenda decide important matters regarding the future of the EU.

Estonians overwhelmingly approved their country’s accession into the EU last Sunday as the Swedes were just as overwhelmingly refusing to give up their currency to get into the Euro.

Tomorrow, Latvia will be the last country to confirm through a popular referendum whether or not to proceed with EU membership. Besides Malta, Latvia is the only other candidate country where the referendum decision was, and still is, no forgone conclusion. In Latvia, there is a vibrant movement against their joining the EU and next Sunday we will see whether the decisive segment of undecided voters will sway to the Yes vote to give the EU Commission a 100% success rate among candidate countries, or whether Latvia will be the exception to rule. Indications are that the Yes will pip their nose at the finishing line but with a thin margin.

These referenda force me to reflect. Latvia has given itself 5 months of extra debate following the signing of the Treaty in Athens to permit an informed decision by the population. What reason was there for Malta to hold the referendum one month before the signing of the Treaty at a time when the Treaty was still making the rounds of final approval in the European Parliament, before the Treaty was widely discussed in all its details and before it was available in Maltese translation?

I have long maintained that the choice of 8 March for Malta to be the first country to go to the accession referendum was determined by the convenience of partisan politics and not by national interest. The holding of the referendum before the election became a partisan political tool, funded by the taxpayers, permitting the government a very detailed view of the state of voter disgruntlement. This gave the PN a perfect opportunity to address the disgruntlement during the five weeks between the referendum and the election, resorting to the lowest level of political clientelism that has eroded the soul of this country.

If there is one particular point in time when Labour threw away the last election it is when in January their leader replied to the PM’s offer to reach agreement for a referendum in March and attached a 60 per cent condition to a proposal for a binding post-election referendum. This permitted the Prime Minister to disregard Labour’s views and proceed in the manner which was most politically convenient for the PN without offending public opinion. Had Labour simply replied by making an unconditional offer to hold a binding referendum after the election, we would probably be holding a truly national EU referendum next weekend concurrently with Latvia but under a Labour government.

Which makes all of us who feel that on the domestic front the country is overdue for a change of administration, just wonder why Labour chose to be so sadomasochist to submit itself to the 52 per cent majority decision at the election but expected a 60 per cent threshold just three months earlier! With such a record how can Alfred Sant claim that his personal position lends credibility to labour’s new EU policy?

The Swedish nej to the Euro shows that while the power of the media cannot be under-estimated, Labour’s phobia that the media disadvantage cannot be overcome is a convenient excuse for the deficiency of the policy content. The Swedes, as the Danish three years earlier, pushed aside all the pressure from the broad spectrum of the political corps, the big business associations and a large part of the Trade Union movement to stamp down their feet and declare in no uncertain terms that they do not want to take unquantifiable risk with their social democracy model.

On the maxim that the electorate is always right, these referenda are delivering a clear message. At ground zero people are quite comfortable with the enlargement but are not at all comfortable with the centralisation and deepening one size fits all that the Commission is trying to impose. EU leaders had better take note if they expect the new EU constitution to be accepted by the people whom they represent.