Momentum has highlighted the fact that on this Sette Giugno, as Malta pauses to remember the six men who died in 1919 for the democratic rights of their compatriots, ”a new parliament is about to be sworn in that still deliberately excludes the votes of thousands of Maltese citizens.”

Guzeppi Bajada of Xaghra, Gozo, was one of the victims who lost his life on that day.

The Party noted that the events of 7 June 1919 were a ”turning point. The deaths of those four men, and of two others who later succumbed to their wounds, forced the hand of the colonial authorities and led to the establishment of self-government in Malta. It was a step forward, but an incomplete one: women could not vote, and neither could thousands of men. A significant portion of the population had no voice.”

”One hundred and seven years later, smaller parties have not been represented in parliament for decades. Until the 30 May election, roughly one national quota’s worth of voters went unrepresented with each general election,” said Momentum.

It added that ”last Saturday’s result tripled that figure. The 4,700 citizens who voted for Momentum, and the 3,994 who voted for ADPD, will not have a single representative in the new parliament, despite together casting enough votes to merit two seats under our system of proportional representation.”

”What makes this more troubling,” said Momentum, ”is the contrast with how the gender corrective mechanism operates. Under that mechanism, seats will be allocated to candidates who received far fewer than 1,000 votes.”

Momentum said it supports measures to encourage increased representation of women in parliament. ”However, there is a profound injustice in a system that creates a mechanism to correct one democratic deficit while ignoring another entirely.”

Sandra Gauci, the chairperson of ADPD, stood as a woman candidate for a smaller party and received a meaningful number of votes, said Momentum. ”Not a single mechanism exists to give her or her voters a voice, instead the Gender corrective mechanism discriminates against her by explicitly skipping her.”

Momentum stated that ”our forebears died for democratic ideals on this day in 1919. Are the present generations prepared to simply accept that nearly 9,000 of their fellow citizens’ votes are ignored, and that their rightful representatives are denied a seat at the table?”

Momentum said it will continue to press for comprehensive electoral reform that gives every vote its proper weight. Malta’s democracy cannot be complete while thousands of citizens are represented by no one.

”The men and women who shaped this country’s democratic history did not fight for a parliament that works for two parties only. The 8,694 people who voted for Momentum and ADPD last Saturday deserve representation,” said Mark Camilleri Gambin, Momentum’s General Secretary.

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