ADPD’s Sandra Gauci misses out on Parliament seat due to gender quota ignoring non-PN/PL candidates
ADPD chairperson Sandra Gauci will miss out on a seat in Parliament, despite securing results that surpassed those of candidates expected to benefit from Malta’s gender corrective mechanism.
The gender corrective mechanism excludes candidates who do not contest under the Labour Party or Nationalist Party tickets.
The way in which female MPs are elected via the gender quota is worked out based on the final number of votes that a female candidate achieve, as a percentage of the quota of the district that they contested in.
That means that on the 12th district, Sandra Gauci, who was knocked out of the running at the 17th count with 950 votes, had achieved 26.05% of the district quota by that point.
That percentage is enough to rank higher than two PN candidates who are set to be elected via the gender quota mechanism: Annabelle Cilia – who was knocked out with 16.87% of the quota on the 6th district, and Marilena Gauci – who was knocked out with just 13.77% of the quota on the 9th district.
That translates to 662 final count votes for Cilia and just 525 final count votes for Gauci.
Yet, Gauci will not be elected into Parliament because the gender quota mechanism completely ignores the existence of any candidates who did not contest for the PL or the PN.
Gauci’s fellow green candidate Melissa Bagley, in fact, can also feel aggrieved.
She achieved 590 final count votes on the 5th district, which was enough for 14.81% of the gender quota – which is also higher than the tally that PN candidate Marilena Gauci achieved.
The unfairness persists further when one considers that the current ranking of those to be elected via the gender quota is not final.
Should female candidates who are in the top six of either party’s list be elected via a casual election, then they are automatically out of the quota evaluation.
If one of the six top ranked non-elected female candidates for the PN – which are Bernice Bonello, Julie Zahra, Graziella Attard Previ, Norma Camilleri, Annabelle Cilia, and Marilena Gauci – are elected via casual election, the next woman in line to be elected via the quota is Miriana Calleja Testaferrata de Noto.
This is despite the fact that she only achieved 5.97% of the quota on the 5th district – a paltry final count of 238 votes.
Meanwhile, all six of the candidates currently in line to be elected via the gender quota on the PL’s side – Ramona Attard, Cressida Galea, Rebecca Buttigieg, Fleur Abela, Francesca Zarb, and Yana Borg Debono Grech – have a district quota percentage higher than that achieved by Sandra Gauci.
The candidate who is first in line should one of the above be elected via a casual election – Naomi Cachia – also achieved a marginally higher percentage than Gauci, at 26.19% of the district quota.
Any candidate ranked further down the list, however, did not have a higher percentage share than Gauci.
That includes Deborah Schembri (23.22%), and MPs from the last legislature Romilda Zarb (19.73%), Katya de Giovanni (17.29%), Abigail Camilleri (16.20%), and Davina Sammut Hili (15.58%).
The gender quota mechanism was approved in Parliament by both the PL and PN in 2021.
At the time, PN MP Hermann Schiavone had said that the party had proposed for the mechanism to also apply to third party candidates, but the PL government refused. The PN voted in favour of the reform regardless.
Both Gauci and Bagley also missed out on getting elected via the gender corrective mechanism in the same way in 2022.
In a Facebook post, Momentum leader Arnold Cassola said that Gauci was the tenth highest-ranked unelected female candidate after obtaining 513 first-count votes.
“But Sandra is apparently a lesser woman, a lesser human being. Why? Because she does not belong to the privileged class of women with a PL/PN pedigree,” Cassola wrote.
He said that Gauci will be excluded while candidates with fewer votes would enter Parliament through the mechanism.
“This is what they call democracy in Malta: two parties making rules tailor-made to suit themselves alone,” he said.
Cassola said that the gender corrective mechanism was “never truly about gender equality” but was instead “only meant to consolidate the duopoly.”
“What a bunch of thieves. I will fight you until God gives strength and life,” he concluded.
Gauci herself has suggested that she will step away from politics, and criticised how the gender corrective mechanism works.
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