The great Green raspberry

A little earlier than this time last year Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici was ranting about abortion and the EU. It had been a stunning conversion to orthodox Catholicism by the former Prime Minister who achieved fame in his attempt to nationalise Church assets and threatening to close Church schools. He had been in the driving seat when the Curia was ransacked by a mob on the rampage.

Just a few weeks ago another Prime Minister became very hot under the collar about abortion forgetting that Dr KMB's CNI had driven the Nationalist government to negotiate a specific protocol preventing the EU from ever imposing any pro-abortion stance on Malta. Dr Gonzi also went overboard on the matter of size. It was a curious obsession.

Size does not matter in the European Parliament: there are only minorities there and the very biggest is unable to exploit its preponderance when the EP legislates. Co-legislation procedures require a two thirds majority in the EP. What would the PN do with a Maltese majority of three in a group of 280 which is itself a minority?

Once the election was over Labour had polled 48 per cent of the vote. It was immediately infected with the size obsession and announced to the delight of the massed clans that it was the biggest party in Malta. The explosion with a loud bang of the PN paper bomb has held no lesson for the MLP.

The harrowing defeat for the MLP in 2003 has been exceeded in 2004: Labour polled 14,000 fewer votes than it did in its crushing failure last year. This being Malta, the MLP is celebrating.

The idiot spinners responsible for PN PR are unable to rip the MLP charade to shreds: to point at the MLP deception would reveal their own spiral down the drain. The PN masterminds are still firing at AD to draw attention away from the fact that their losses from last year's election result are a heart-stopping 44,000 votes. They are also patronising 22,000 people who voted for the Greens. It is a fatal mistake: intelligent voters will not forgive the insult.

Former Nationalist guru Lou Bondì more or less complimented MLP leader Alfred Sant for making a gain of 0.9 per cent over the 2003 fiasco. Dr Sant lapped it up and returned the compliment by avoiding any knife twisting about the PN losing votes. Lou is still a Nationalist as he has every right to be. He also has every right to claim guru status. It was brilliantly creative.

Pity I was there to draw attention to political reality. Malta has blown a deafening raspberry at the whole political class. On May 1 EU membership had forced open the doors of every political party and all the political prisoners simply walked out to freedom. The party cathedrals no longer seem worth the million lira debt burden.

The MLP lost least and their celebration should be allowed to comfort half the country which has had nothing to celebrate for long since 1981. It is a bit indecent for a party which has been crippled further to celebrate the fact that its adversary has been blinded, but good taste is another matter.

Of course most of the votes that came to the Greens must have come from the pro-EU camp. Of course the vast majority are ex-Nationalists, disgruntled Nationalists and Nationalists spitting mad at their own leadership. How many of them are Greens who voted PN in 2003 to make EU membership possible, we will never know. They will never get a thank you from anyone in power today for their ability to hold their nose and vote this version of the PN into power once more in 2003.

What is truly stunning is the depth of PN anger at the PN. AD polled 22,000 first preference votes, running them up to nearly 30,000 in its fight to the finish with the last MLP candidate in the race. There are another 26,000 PN votes absent without Joe Saliba's leave from this election.

There are more Nationalists stampeding out of the PN political prison than have chosen to join the Green raspberry chorus.

Although Joe Saliba has announced that AD is the PN's new adversary (thank you Joe), he has committed a worse folly than opening a war on two fronts. He has a three-front war on his hands. Of the 44,000 grown-ups that Mr Saliba insists on patronising, 26,000 have not even bothered to set up a flag. They are Joe Saliba's Al Qaeda. He can seek them here and he can seek them there all he likes. They will strike where and when they prefer. The PN's third front is an all-time novelty. AD was never adversarial towards the PN; we simply could not understand the stupid attacks.

Today, Joe Saliba is the best asset the Greens possess just as Alfred Sant has been the PN's best asset for a decade. It is an asset we can afford to sacrifice for the good of the nation. Will what remains of the PN hang onto Mr Saliba with the pusillanimity of the MLP with regard to Dr Sant? Will they lynch him for the idiocy of block voting the MLP into a majority? If PN voters had been allowed to give a No. 9 preference to Arnold Cassola, the PN would not have heaped an MLP victory on top of their harrowing ruin. Nor would they have denied the country the chance to influence a third political grouping in the EP.

In the post-Armageddon press conference Prime Minister Gonzi became the Lawrence Gonzi I once knew and personally admired. It is far too easy to exploit his political naivety.

Listening to his mind-boggling admissions, I felt nothing but sympathy for him. He described the ex-PN support which was transferred to the Greens as an intelligent vote. It was not a compliment to those who remained addicted to the Saliba brew. He said that the Maltese had shown that they want a serious government. My guess is that he was referring to the pre-Gonzi PN as not quite that serious. He was generous: he said he would have done exactly what the Greens had done. Pity that Joe Saliba had not suggested something Greenlike sooner.

Lawrence Gonzi was himself in the initial reaction. There was no time for Joe Saliba and Co. to prompt and patronise the Prime Minister. He was himself: a decent and a profoundly democratic person; perhaps a little more truthful than recently. Listening, I forgave him all the filth of the election campaign. He has enough on his plate and should be spared my personal resentment.

Besides, the Greens have won a spectacular victory and we should be magnanimous as no party has ever been. The MLP can be allowed to celebrate a fake 0.9 per cent victory. How can the Greens celebrate a concrete 1,300 per cent gain? Overnight Arnold Cassola's fight to the finish has transformed the Maltese Greens into the third largest (by percentage) Green Party in Europe. There is no way we can ever hold a fitting celebration but we will be having a street party for Greens & Friends in Republic Street, Valletta tomorrow evening. Everybody is invited to blow a raspberry at the past which is gone for good.

Never again will any political party prostitute the country's major religion for political ends. The Catholic Church is no longer the pawn of any political party. Never again will any political guru exploit bigotry, prudery and sheer hypocrisy to the extent it has been used as a flail on our backs. The other parties are free of the blackmail of political bogeymen such as the hunting lobby.

We have entered an era of real politics. The Greens have knocked down the wall and everybody can walk through to a political reality that has caught up with the tolerant, liberal and pluralistic social reality we have built for ourselves as a nation.

As I passed the last armed guard to leave the Ta' Qali counting hall, it occurred to me that I was leaving the premises of the former Malta Spinning and Weaving Co., a relic of Malta's connection with Mao's China. That world is ended for good. The Cold War political fabrications have come to an end in this election. The MLP have been Europeanised to the full and the Greens have come of age.

Our common future beckons.

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