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The Prime Minister yesterday served notice of a Bill to amend the Constitution and the Nationalist Party said the idea was to declare Gozo a single electoral boundary.
The PN said the Bill would be moved after all-party talks over the past year, aimed at improving the electoral system, failed to yield an agreement. It said the latest meeting was held on Tuesday evening.
Michael Falzon, the Labour Party’s deputy leader for party affairs, told Super One TV nobody had decided that the talks had been formally concluded.
The MLP, he added, was in favour of Gozo being one single electoral district. However the PN wanted to use this as an excuse to change the electoral boundaries in Malta as well, in order to have a repetition of the 1996 election result when the MLP had won a majority of 8,000 votes but the PN won three parliamentary seats more. The MLP was then assigned extra seats to give it a parliamentary majority of one seat.
The PN said it had insisted during the talks that Gozo should be declared a single district forthwith and that no conditions would be attached to such a move. “While a wider discussion took place on changes to the electoral law, the MLP continued to attach conditions to this proposal for Gozo to be declared a single district,” it added.
Revised electoral boundaries issued by the Electoral Commission at the end of last July saw Ghajnsielem being hived off the Gozo district because the island’s population had exceeded the limits set by the Constitution for each electoral district.
MLP deputy leader Charles Mangion, speaking in Parliament last night, referred to the talks held by the political parties, saying they were based on the achievement of strict proportionality based on the first count as well as governability.
It was the PN that had linked all these to the issue of Gozo being considered as one whole district.
The MLP agreed that Gozo, as a whole, should be one district but this should not be an excuse for electoral boundaries to be changed around to favour the PN.
A solution for the Gozo issue could be found easily, without involving other matters, Dr Mangion said.
It would be better if the government took other actions which the Gozitan economy sorely needed, including a subsidy for the helicopter service and job creation, he said.
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