'Then you go and spoil it all...'

In the Old Blue Eyes song the spoiling happened by saying something stupid like "I love you". The old blues spoil it all by saying the opposite.

Louis Deguara's paean to independence and to his party leader last week included some vainglorious stuff about independence, the longsightedness of his party's leadership, the shortsightedness of the Malta Labour Party and the magnanimity of his party leader in not being too rough on a losing MLP.

There was an echo of the new spring talk and a mention of consensus politics. And then he spoilt it all by saying that if the MLP did not play ball the PN would carry on in its glorious march alone.

It is not Dr Deguara's fault. His PM does exactly the same. Every other Nationalist minister/journalist is running on rails too. They seem unable not to spoil it all by being themselves.

There will not be a new spring because the Nationalist Party does not know how to bring it about. As a majoritarian party it is all about absolute power. It may appear to want to grant, to concede but it cannot. Its survival in government alone comes first.

It demands the goodwill of the opposition from a position of dominance. In acting magnanimously it goads mercilessly and defeats the purpose. It claims that the MLP has no choice but to accept if it wants to be decent. It makes acceptance almost impossible. It claims that it will ignore the MLP altogether if the MLP does not play ball.

The PN is waiting for November for the MLP to sort itself out. The country has held its breath since April waiting for November. It has felt it has had no government because it has had no opposition. Time stood still while the economy teetered further.

If the PN spoils it all with mechanical regularity, the MLP retains the potential to spoil anything anytime. We all know that they are both trapped in a dance macabre. They want us to believe that it is politics.

They give life to one another while they kill us all slowly. Everybody knows that we are going nowhere fast but the dance goes on.

Why should the MLP do anything more than appear to play the game? Why should the PN do anything more than appear to share power? Why should the MLP, deprived of real power, burden itself with a share of responsibility for the worst economic ride in decades? If the PN threatens to go it alone, why should the MLP lift a finger? When did the rules of zero-sum politics change?

It has been our well-documented political history that the opposition allows the government to flounder in an economic mess of its own making. It is well within the rules of the sad two-party game for the opposition to trip up the government whenever it has a chance. The economy? That too, but that is only collateral damage. Political terrorism? Yes.

The government and the opposition face each other in an eternal standoff as if they were the only reality. They believe that between them they represent the whole country which has to hold its breath indefinitely while they do their shadow boxing.

They are becoming an irrelevance because the spring they are talking about is just talk. It is not going to happen because they are unable to make it happen. They are institutionally designed for mutual assured destruction not cooperation. The empty seats in parliament are ranged in two opposed rows determining eternal confrontation. Nothing sprouts in parliament.

The new spring which Alternattiva Demokratika had in mind before April was not a concession of the PN to the MLP but a development of the major political change announced in the national consultation during the EU negotiations process.

It was not an intraparty concession but a civil society development, the promise of empowerment of the people, of their representative organisations, an admission of non-omniscience of the political class, that politicians would benefit by sharing decision-making power with various other representatives of the people. The earth was warm and we could sense that there were fertile seeds in it.

And then a political winter set in during the longest heatwave on record. The PN chose to rule alone. Not to let the spring happen but to be the one to appear to make it happen, to grant, to concede, to force an acceptance or else.

Nothing has happened for six long months. Worse than that we have a prime ministerial Bundyist exploit in the Independence Day speech smacking civil society in the mouth for not being in a spring mood. Civil society will have to play the game too or be accused of being spoilsports. If that is the tone, you can keep your fake new spring.

It was a throwback to the PN complaint against "arrogant citizens" after winding them up for years with drittijiet mhux pjaciri (rights as opposed to favours). It was a freezing cold shower that washed away any warming up to the national unity rhetoric that came just before it.

The MLP is constrained to accept EU membership but it feels the compelling attraction of this government's economic woes. It has to manage the U-turn from EU phobia but it also knows it can come in for the kill anytime soon. Spring? You must be kidding. The moribund MLP leadership hangs on against all odds because it still has a hushed whisper of hope. It comes from the wings of vultures circling over the PN government.

It is not for the government to make a new spring happen but for civil society to demand it, to seize it and to make it work. Civil society must realise its responsibility if it is to wield the power it must have. There is a new and difficult political struggle ahead in which civil society bodies must seize their share of power, no more, no less. It will not happen by accepting to be token niggers in fake new spring fêtes. Anything is better than nothing is no longer good enough.

The EU negotiations consultations were hurried, severely limited by time constraints, frustrating for virtually all participants. What comes next must be the real thing. The seeds must sprout if they are to become a perennial growth.

It is not for the political class to concede and it would be a sad mistake if civil society waits for dreams to come true on their own. Civil society must take what it has good reason to recognise as its own.

No more fawning on the government. No more paralysis because it is caught between the Scylla Charybdis vortex of the MLP-PN struggle for power. No more getting played off against the other side in the civil society seesaw. No more dependence on the government as an arbiter but real leadership to hammer out consensus because our common future demands it regardless of the fate of political parties.

The civil society alliance in favour of EU membership was an historical event which the PN has tried to monopolise. So much for magnanimity. It marks a major development of civil society, a paradigm leap. A very significant number of the major civil society organisations appeared to espouse the cause of two out of three political parties. It probably helped that two parties joined forces.

What was significant was that these organisations stepped out of the two-party trap. They did not espouse the cause of political parties but expressed their commitment to a historical development. They made it possible. It was the two political parties that needed them and not the other way around.

Civil society leaders encouraged one another in taking the unprecedented step. They all had a divided membership. They acted as leaders, not followers. In the face of a major historical responsibility they took a difficult, perhaps dangerous step, one which appeared to take their organisations into the field of politics, one which seemed impossible to take until it was taken.

They did step into politics but not into party politics. They began to shoulder a non-partisan political responsibility which was only theirs, which has been theirs from then on and one which, it seems, they may be denied unless they find the will to regain it.

It is only too easy to allow our reality to be dominated by the sterile tug-of-war between the PN and the MLP: to become passive and wait for decisions by a one-party government which is waiting for a one-party opposition to find out which way the cookie crumbles.

There are signs that the Meusac lessons have not been unlearnt. Some civil society organisations have kicked up their heels and refuse to be corralled again. They have a duty to speak regardless of the political interests of the government and the opposition. They are wary of being politically labelled but more of being emasculated out of fear of being labelled.

It is a joy to watch them even when they kick up the dust in my face. Perhaps they are unstoppable. Perhaps the PN, aided by AD, has engineered an escape it will not be able to reverse.

What it would mean is that civil society will represent citizens as citizens and will refuse to be slapped down by any Bundyist politician. Perhaps civil society will be able to guard its territory against political parties and thereby engineer the political reform the parties are unable to bring about.

The two political parties in parliament have exhausted themselves in zero sum politics which has produced our economic minus. They have manoeuvred one another into an endless stalemate which leaves our society far ahead of its laws and politics, but weighed down in its lunge for freedom.

The determined self-empowerment of civil society can make eternal political confrontation seem more of an extravagance than it already does. It can make the end of two-party politics a reality. It can provide a check to balance party political power, demand scrutiny, transparency and accountability of all political parties.

It can make Malta more European than the PN alone can ever hope to make it. It can eliminate once and for all the menace which the two-party system will always hold to the free exercise of civil society rights and duties, the development we reached out for in taking on the challenge of EU membership. Freedom and the responsibility it brings must be won, not accepted as a conditional gift.

Dr Vassallo is chairman of Alternattiva Demokratika - The Green Party.