Alternattiva Demokratika will be doing its utmost to elect a member of Parliament in the next election even though tripartite talks on electoral reform have failed, chairman Harry Vassallo said yesterday.

“The charade is over at long last and the Greens can now concentrate on getting to Parliament the hard way. We will make it no matter what the hurdles may be and we will show the other parties the sensitive and sophisticated democracy they are afraid of,” he said.

Tripartite talks, which had been started in the early 1990s culminating with the Gonzi report proposing a five per cent threshold in 1995, was re-embarked upon last year.

But the Prime Minister on Wednesday served notice of a Bill to amend the Constitution so that Gozo will be declared a single electoral district, with the PN saying the Bill was moved after the tripartite talks failed to yield an agreement.

The MLP’s position is that nobody has decided that talks were formally concluded and it is in favour of Gozo being one single district.

Addressing a news conference yesterday, Dr Vassallo said the failure of the tripartite negotiations revealed a lack of commitment to democratic principles.

He said it was outrageous that the Labour Party proposed to govern the country alone with a 45 per cent relative majority.

On the other hand, it was disgusting that the Nationalist Party proposed amendments to the electoral system such as the elimination of cross party voting and an electoral threshold of 7.5 per cent – the equivalent of the 23,000 votes obtained by AD in the European Parliament elections.

The PN also proposed the invalidation of the election of a candidate in one district overcoming the existing 16.6 per cent district threshold if his or her party did not also gain 7.5 per cent of the vote nationwide.

All such measures, Dr Vassallo said, only affected AD and were tailored to minimise the chances of its representation in Parliament.

He said that in the course of negotiations AD prodded the process along by accepting a very difficult five per cent national threshold. This threshold, proposed by the PN in 1995, would be a much harder challenge for a new arrival in Malta than elsewhere. This was because it was unheard of elsewhere that political parties were completely free to be financed by tycoons.

“The failure of the talks brings no unexpected change, no greater challenge than we have faced before.”

He called on Maltese voters to recognise the country’s democratic deficit and that it has been the country’s major and most threatening political obstacle to have just two parties hogging representation in Parliament for the past 30 years.

Dr Vassallo said that his only regret at the failure of the talks was that it had taken so long for the other parties to come to their forgone zero-sum conclusion.

“It has taken over a decade of negotiations to get nowhere at all. The failure of the talks in effect eliminates any claim to democratic credentials by the other parties,” Dr Vassallo said.

On Gozo, Dr Vassallo said that it was ludicrous that the PN purported to be the champion of Gozitans when its proposal would ensure that Gozitans would suffer from progressive under-representation.

“All three parties agree that Gozo should not be partitioned. However, keeping it separate and electing only five MPs while its population continues to grow, as the PN proposes, would mean that the level of representation available to Gozitans would be progressively eroded over the years.

“There is nothing in the law preventing the granting of an additional seat to Gozo in view of the increase of population. However, this option is rejected by the other parties because they refuse to face the upheaval among their candidates through the resulting district reshuffle in the rest of the country,” Dr Vassallo said.

That the PN claimed credit with Gozitans when they were in effect reducing their level of representation, was an insult to Gozitan intelligence, he said.

Another solution to the situation was to permit Maltese residents with a property in Gozo to keep the Malta address on their ID card but retain the privileges they enjoyed on Gozo Channel, he said.

The PN said yesterday that the government’s aim behind its proposal was for Gozo to remain a single district guaranteeing that the Gozitans would always vote together as a region.

The MLP’s position in view of the government’s proposal showed that Labour did not believe in regionality and wanted a situation where Gozitans would be divided in two electoral districts, the PN said.