Constitutional violations

By Hilbert Haar

Much has been said and written about the violation of constitutional rules related to the upcoming elections. Those violations have occurred because our lawmakers got lost in the way they have established those rules.

It feels like an innocent factual observation in article 59 of the Constitution that Nomination Day – also known under the more Christian term Postulation Day – has to take place between 80 and 90 days before the term of the current Parliament ends or before the date when the Parliament is being dissolved.

The constitution also establishes that, when the government decides to dissolve the Parliament, the new Parliament has to take office within three months. That’s where the trouble started, though the government initially got it right.

On November 2, the National Gazette published a decree that set the date for the arrival of the new Parliament at January 31 – that’s 89 days away from the date of the announcement.

Perfect. There was only one problem: political parties would have to submit their list of candidates on November 13, just ten days after the announcement.

So on November 12, the government amended the decree. It set the date for the new Parliament to take office on April 2 of this year. That’s 141 days between the announcement and the arrival of the new Parliament and therefore an obvious violation of the Constitution. What the decree did however, was give political wannabees as well as established political parties plenty of time – 54 days to be exact – to put their lists of candidates together.

Nomination Day – January 5, again meets the requirements of the Constitution: it’s 88 days before the new Parliament takes office.

Had the government – and the Governor with it – followed the Constitution on November 12, it would have had to set the date for installing a new Parliament at February 12.

That would have pushed back the prescribed date for Nomination Day to between November 14 and November 24, recreating the problem that arose from the first decree. It would give parties no time to put together their lists of candidates, let alone give new parties the time to establish themselves.

One may well wonder what is worse: violating the Constitution by pushing the installment of a new Parliament beyond the legally prescribed term of three months, or violating the democratic rights of citizens to prepare for elections by putting together a solid list of candidates or to establish a new political party.

Pushing the date for the installment of the new Parliament further back would, under normal circumstances leave a caretaker government longer in office than the law allows. The arrival of an interim-government counters that concern.

That the formation of the interim-government takes longer than expected cannot be held against the caretaker government; they have nothing to do with it. The cause lies for one hundred percent with the people the new majority wanted to put in that interim-government.

As we all know, formateur Franklin Meyers was to become the interim prime minister but he failed the screening. Knowing how the screening process works, I think that he should have seen that one coming.

For now, it seems not very productive to keep moaning about the constitutional violations in this process. Energy will be better spent on taking a good hard look at the rules that govern our country and to change them in a way that prevents future mishaps.