The politics of Zaldivar

Many of those who live in the 25 member states of the European Union who plan to vote in the June elections to choose their representatives in the European Parliament will be using these elections to pass judgment on their governments. After all, choosing MEPs is like choosing your local councillor and MP... there is a continuum between the local, national and European space. Half of what is usually decided nationally is now being decided within European institutions, so it is no wonder that local and national issues dominate EP elections. Where they do not, people feel disconnected from the electoral process and stay away from voting.

This is exactly why a study carried out for the EP by Trinity College of Dublin recommended that parties give national flavours to their campaigns and mobilise citizens on local and national issues if they want them to take part in the June elections.

Polls in different EU states show how citizens will vote in June according to how they feel their government is faring. A Le Monde/RTL poll shows that more that 63 per cent of French voters intend to use the European elections to register a "protest vote" against the government for allowing unemployment to rise and for eroding the welfare state. The Dutch coalition government led by the Christian Democrats is set to face a major defeat, as citizens want to show that they are unhappy with the new policies being implemented. Austrians are expected to teach the centre-right government "a lesson" when they vote in the EP elections on June 13.

No wonder that the Nationalist Party has tried to persuade Maltese voters that the EP elections have nothing to do with domestic politics and are simply a vote about "Europe". The PN is scared that voters will turn out to express judgment on the government. After so much rhetoric about a new spring, public finances on a sound footing, boundless opportunities for jobs, new investment and a better quality of life PN government policies have delivered unemployment, higher taxes, hundreds of jobs at risk in companies like Air Malta and a number of other public companies and corporations and cuts in public expenditure that are harming the economy and hurting thousands of families and pensioners.

The Nationalist Party does not want to be judged on this record and so is trying to turn the EP elections into a moral and political issue: mounting a hysterical and unfair attack on Alternattiva Demokratika about abortion and telling people not to vote Labour because the MLP stood for a different kind of close relationship with the EU till the last general election.

The Nationalist Party is telling voters it deserves their trust, as it is a credible party. Let us take the public deficit. A European Commission report published a fortnight ago concludes that "the excess of the general government deficit over the three per cent of GDP reference value does not result, in the sense of the Stability and Growth Pact, from an unusual event outside the control of the Maltese authorities, nor is it the result of a severe economic downturn."

In simple and blunt language the European Commission is saying that government created this deficit and must take steps to reduce it. The Nationalist Government did not attack the European Commission and called it "liars", "idiots", "imbeciles", "stupid", "false prophets" and other insults that Labour politicians were subjected to by Nationalist politicians over 10 years ago when they started pointing to the unsustainable deficit and public debt that were being created by the reckless policies of the PN government.

In the summer of 1996 the Nationalist Party opted for an early election not to let the truth about the public deficit come out into the open. When the new Labour government started explaining the terrible situation public finances were in, the Nationalist Party promptly dismissed the claims and said that the Labour Party was lying. Within a few months the PN started blaming the MLP for the deficit.

The truth deficit

This reminds me of what my favourite Chilean poet Pablo Neruda narrates in his memoirs after Chilean Christian Democratic politician Radomiro Tomic visited him at his home: "Discouraged as he was, Tomic revealed something to me before leaving my home. Andres Zaldivar, the Christian Democratic Secretary of the Treasury, had shown him documents that proved the country's economy was already bankrupt. 'We're heading for a fall,' Tomic told me. 'The situation can't last four more months. It's disastrous. Zaldivar has given me the details, our bankruptcy is inevitable.' A month after Allende was elected, but before he took over the Presidency, the same cabinet minister, Zaldivar, publicly announced the country's imminent economic disaster, but this time he blamed it on the international repercussions of Allende's election. That's how history is written. At least that's how it is written by twisted, opportunist politicians like Zaldivar."

The Nationalist Party had invited Tomic to Malta in the early Eighties and I was lucky enough to hear him speak in public and then interview him for a TV documentary on Chile. He struck me as a man of integrity. But when it came to talking about the deficit they created, Nationalist politicians did not follow Tomic; they followed the twisted, opportunistic politics of Zaldivar.

Since 1998 they have been hiding the deficit problem. Just before the April 2003 general election, on April 6, Dr Eddie Fenech Adami was boasting: "In the 1999 budget a plan of action was launched to reduce the deficit to 3% of GDP. This plan is being implemented and the targets are being met earlier than predicted." A year later the deficit had shot to over 9% of GDP.

I still remember vividly 11 Novembers ago, in my first few months as a MP, watching Minister John Dalli rising to give his first budget speech, promising that he would control government expenditure, keep the structural deficit below three per cent, contain public debt and create a business environment to enable the country's economy to compete and prosper in the years ahead.

During the months of the referendum and general election campaigns the Nationalist government did not publish any statistics about the state of public finances as it wanted to conceal the fact they were growing. Meanwhile it mounted huge billboards saying the public finances were on a sound footing and its leaders claimed in their speeches that the deficit was being contained and reduced when the opposite was happening.

On June 12 Maltese voters should teach the Nationalist Party a lesson about its politics of deception.