MEP suffering fatal 1998 error by Malta to miss out on sixth seat talks - Cassola

Former MEP candidate Arnold Cassola has said Malta’s sixth seat in the European Parliament was compromised way back in December 1998 when a Maltese delegation headed by then prime minister Eddie Fenech Adami, decided not to stay on at the Nice conference in France, when the present repartition of seats in the European Parliament was decided upon.

A decade of inaction over the sixth seat has left Maltese MEP Joseph Cuschieri – who gave up his seat in the Maltese parliament to co-opt Labour leader Joseph Muscat – in the lurch and pursuing a lone battle marked by obtuse public outbursts. In his last eruption, Cuschieri demanded that Malta veto the Greek bailout unless the debt-ridden EU state ratifies the protocol for the extra seats in the European Parliament.

Cuschieri was elected Malta’s sixth MEP in 2009 thanks to the Lisbon Treaty, which increased the seats in the EP to 750. But initially, Malta had just five seats under the Nice Treaty – a situation that persisted right up until a 2004 inter-governmental conference in Greece.

The former secretary-general of the European Green Party, Arnold Cassola, came sixth in the European Parliament elections in 2004.

He says that after having rebuffed the sixth seat, he was called three days after the EP elections by foreign minister John Dalli (now EU Commissioner for Health), asking him to persuade German foreign minister Joschka Fischer not to veto the sixth for Malta.

“Until then, the German regions were objecting to this: why should Malta with a population of 400,000 population get an extra seat when the 14 million people in Rhineland Westphalia did not get extra seats?” the former secretary-general of the European Green Party said.

Using his influence with the Green foreign minister, Cassola called up Fischer’s closest aide. “You can imagine the frame of mind I was in, getting so many votes and not being elected,” he said of his 23,000 first preference votes. “But I had to put our country’s interests first. Two days later, Fischer gave me his OK on condition that we don’t go public since it would have strongly irritated the German regional governments.

“I informed Dalli, who met Fischer in an informal corridor meeting that same week on a Saturday. And Germany officially lifted its reservations and Malta got its sixth seat.”

Lost chances

As it turns out however, Joseph Cuschieri still does not have that seat and Cassola lays the blame squarely at government’s feet – even though he does not spare Cuschieri of his criticism at his uncouth diplomacy.

“It’s not Europe’s fault but the result of crass Maltese incompetence,” Cassola says.

Cassola argues that Malta could have had its sixth seat in December 1998 in Nice, but a “short-sighted” Maltese delegation left the negotiating table a full 24 hours before the end of the meeting.

“Instead they left Joanna Drake, then still an inexperienced lawyer, to negotiate with Europe’s political sharks. So Malta ended up getting just five seats, while Luxembourg with our same population, and Cyprus, got six!”

Cassola is quick to add that Drake, who later ran for the MEP elections and was also head of the EU representation in Malta, was not really at fault. “It was the presumptuous Maltese delegation that underestimated the importance of Nice.”

And yet, Cassola adds that this could have been redressed four years later in Copenhagen in December 2002 when Hungary and the Czech Republic – totally dissatisfied with their 18 seats which Nice gave them – demanded they get 22, as much as Belgium and Portugal which had the same population size.

“Malta could have easily joined and strengthened their position, since it had got a seat less than Luxembourg, which roughly is as big as Matla in population,” Cassola says.

But he claims that Fenech Adami and main negotiator Richard Cachia Caruana, along with foreign minister Joe Borg and future MEP Simon Busuttil “took a calculated political decision” not to pursue a sixth seat that could be won by either Labour or Alternattiva Demokratika.

“So Malta’s interests were sacrificed on the altar of the PN’s greed: in Copenhagen the Czechs and the Hungarians had their EP seats increased to 22 whilst the Maltese government totally gave up its sixth seat.”

It was only in 2004, after Cassola obtained 9.3% of the vote and ending up ‘sixth’ in the final count, that he was asked by John Dalli to lobby with Germany to accept Malta’s sixth seat in a 2004 intergovernmental conference.

Lone campaign

Cassola says that Cuschieri’s style of campaigning for the sixth seat is not bound to reap him results. The former MP has already claimed he has been left alone in his campaign for the sixth seat, and it is also clear that Labour is not making a public effort for the sixth seat.

“If Cuschieri is still out, he owes it to his leader who has used and abused him. Although he is not exactly MEP material, I sincerely wish Cuschieri a speedy solution to his dilemma. He certainly does not deserve to be treated the way he has been treated by his party leadership. On a human level, I fully empathise with his feeling of uneasiness,” Cassola says.

But Cassola adds that Cuschieri’s public whining have also opened him up to ridicule. “He has absolutely no clue about what politics in an international environment is all about.”

Recently Cuschieri said Malta should withhold its support for a Greek bailout unless Greece ratifies the protocol for the extra EP seats. “Cuschieri thinks that by shouting his anathemas against those countries that have not ratified the Lisbon Treaty he is going to speed up this ratification. Wrong! In European politics the more you threaten and blackmail... the less you get. Cuschieri should work behind the scenes and lobby but not in public. In a crisis of global proportions, such as the Greek economic situation, it is absolutely pathetic to put your sixth seat on the same level.”