The Labour Party’s gender-quota seats have now been confirmed, and six Labour women who were not elected directly in the general election will enter Parliament through Malta’s “gender-corrective mechanism”. These Labour Party MPs have been technically unelected and are now being imposed on us by the two-party system.
They are Cressida Galea, Fleur Abela, Francesca Zarb, Yana Borg Debono Grech, Deborah Schembri and Romilda Zarb.
The mechanism was introduced under the pretext of improving female representation, but it has served to augment the representation of the major parties in Parliament at the expense of smaller parties.
ADPD leader Sandra Gauci, obtained 968 first-count votes across the two districts she contested. She went on to reach 950 votes on the 12th District and 594 on the 6th District, yet she will remain outside Parliament.
Some of Labour’s gender-quota candidates did perform better than Gauci on certain district counts. Francesca Zarb, for instance, obtained 978 first-count votes on the 11th District, while Cressida Galea obtained 902 first-count votes on the 1st District and later rose to 2,094 votes by the last count. Fleur Abela obtained 605 first-count votes and rose to 1,520 by the last count. Yana Borg Debono Grech obtained 685 first-count votes on the 8th District. Romilda Zarb obtained 742 first-count votes on the 11th District. Deborah Schembri’s strongest published first-count figure was much lower, with 262 votes on the 10th District, though her gender-mechanism ranking was based on her last-count performance on the 12th District.
The gender-corrective mechanism can add up to 12 seats to Parliament when the under-represented gender does not reach 40% representation, however, this “mechanism” applies only in a Parliament already captured by the two-party system.
So far , the Labour Party women MPs who have been elected with the gender-corrective mechnism have not served to push the itnerests of woen forward, and in fact none of the women elected with Labour in the last election advocated for the decriminalisation of abortion when fellow women were being threatened with prison sentences under our archiac laws. These women MPs will serve just like their predecessors to promote and defend the Party’s corruption and illiberal practices.
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