MLPN as one entity

Politics is a process of simplification: reduce the universe to sound bites, catch phrases and slogans and you have it made. Most of us don't have the time to scratch beneath the surface on any issue. Very many of us do not want to.

We behave with the grudging compliance of sheep herded, their grazing disturbed. We, the audience, produce the need for sound bites, for nonsensical simplification and expose ourselves to the devastating power of the lie, bald and uncontested.

Through extreme simplification everything becomes devoid of content and meaning exciting only our contempt, justifying our distaste for the whole enterprise and our deepening alienation. We are too smart to dedicate the least part of our minds to any of this drivel. And so it goes on, the slow slide to fascism or the closest thing one can have to it while being part of the EU.

Mussolini coined the term totalitarianism, Oliver Friggieri the term totalisation. Since the end of World War II it is no longer politically correct anywhere in the West to advocate the one-party state. The two-party state is just fine. It is not only in Malta that the process carries on apace. In this, Malta has the lead and the longest experience: two parties totalising one at a time. We acclimatised first to minimal pluralism and now we have settled down to minimal democracy; government by a minority.

While the EU promotes the slogan Unity In Diversity, its member states are in a process leading to duality without diversity. Malta is ahead of the game. Multiculturalism? Not on your life. Protection of minorities? What minorities? Do we have any? Our focus is on having a majority, somehow, anyhow, a relative majority will do perfectly. Then hang the rest.

If Labour had won the recent election it would have been precisely the same. They would have been the relative majority and hang the rest. They were quite prepared for it. They had even proposed the apotheosis of the relative majority in the negotiations on electoral reform: the biggest party to rule even if a coalition of all others would have greater electoral weight. Nothing came of it but they had had the gall to propose to rule the country with just 45 per cent of the vote if nobody had more.

When Alfred Sant speaks of a danger to democracy, of an unelected clique not only dominating the PN but also attempting to influence leadership choice in the MLP, I think I know what or who he means by it. It just jars badly to hear him talk of a danger to democracy. He is part of the tendency to totalising duality, he represents half of it. He is an enthusiastic advocate of the process.

What does it matter who leads the MLP if it remains a mirror image of the PN in its thinking on tolerance of diversity?

There is no need for a covert colonisation of the MLP by the PN; it is already in tacit alliance on the core essentials. Both the PN and the MLP are geared to exclude anything but minimal pluralism, the rule of two-by-two, a super simplified worldview, eternal stagnation and growing political homogeneity, the end of ideology and ideas and the indecent display of brazen opportunism.

If the MLP had made it to government in March, it would be Greener than grass already. It would have had €300 million to spend on everything environmental. It so happens that it will be the PN doing the spending and the Greenwashing, a political accident. Both the PN and the MLP have in mind to take over the space occupied by Alternattiva Demokratika; both will need it in order to secure a victory in five years' time.

It matters not at all to either of them that in order to do so consistently they would have to dismantle their very structures, cut off their source of funding and become something else altogether. They think that they can pull it off. They are convinced that the days of profound thinking in politics is over for good. You have convinced them that if they say something often enough you will believe it. You will even believe that it was your idea in the first place. They may be right or, perhaps, not.

The MLPN is one entity, one fundamental political philosophy, a game played by the same rules producing the same result: progress at the slowest pace possible. It is a vast tacit alliance digesting the indigestible contradictions it contains. It is sustainable development preached by those who have determined the unsustainability of the country for long decades to come, by those who have lived off the proceeds of unsustainable development all their lives. They honestly think that they can pull it off.

Dr Vassallo is chairman of Alternattiva Demokratika - the Green party.

www.alternattiva.org.mt, www.adgozo.com