The sentiment expressed by a Cospicua resident, that former Prime Minister Dom Mintoff was “second only to Our Lord”, smacks of idolatry.
To be a Mintoffian was to be a supporter of or an activist in the Malta Labour Party when Mintoff refounded it after Boffa left...
Many people would not be able to understand why Mr Mintoff was so revered, especially in his hometown.
But for Cospicua residents, Mr Mintoff was the boy next door who forced his way to the top, from where he implemented policies that materially changed their lives for the better.
Mr Mintoff’s brand of socialism, founded in a colonial era, also inspired the birth of Mintoffianism, which for many in Cottonera was an ideology.
The word and its derivative that described Mr Mintoff’s followers as Mintoffjani was also used by detractors to define the man’s forceful tactics and the state interventionist policies he adopted.
However, lost somewhere between the realm of myth and reality lingers the question of whether Mintoffianism was an ideology or simply a strong personality cult that lasted half a century.
Writing in The Times in April, columnist Austin Bencini, a constitutional lawyer, defined Mintoffianism as a product of the personality cult Mr Mintoff had imposed on his party. It became much larger than the entire party itself, he added.
“The Labour Party thereby lost its soul, in that the ideologies of socialism and of social democracy become empty and hollow words, totally absorbed in the will of Mr Mintoff; those who voted Labour became Mintoffian and not socialist,” Dr Bencini said.
But Mintoffianism has its roots in the Labour Party’s split just after the Second World War, according to former party president Mario Vella, an economist and political theorist.
In the late 1940s, Labour supporters identified themselves as Mintoffjani to distinguish themselves from other Labour Party militants, who felt more comfortable with then leader Paul Boffa’s softer line towards Britain.
“To be a Mintoffian was to be a supporter of or an activist in the Malta Labour Party when Mintoff refounded it after Boffa left to set up his Malta Workers Party,” Dr Vella said.
In 1949, Mr Mintoff had forced a crisis in the Labour Party and was elected leader instead of Dr Boffa. The Labour Party spent the next six years in opposition and the Malta Workers Party joined the Nationalist Party in a series of weak coalition governments.
Dr Vella insisted the split between Mintoffjani and Boffisti was not the parting of ways between two personality cults, even though the two leaders had very different personal styles.
Neither was it an ideological difference, he added.
“The split was based on two very different political strategies,” Dr Vella said, and with the Labour Party’s electoral victory of 1955, “the fusion of meanings between Mintoffianism and Labour was effectively complete”.
Later on the word Mintoffian was used to emphasise adherence to Mr Mintoff’s determination to set Malta on a path of economic and social development that would lead it out of its state of abject backwardness, according to Dr Vella.
Mintoffianism was also used to describe the economic policies adopted in the 1970s by the Labour governments of the time that included nationalising the banks, the state’s direct involvement in setting up companies, imposing import controls to protect industry and creating quasi-military worker corps to employ people in what were supposed to be productive activities.
This economic philosophy was not unique to Malta despite its Mintoffian branding, according to economist Lino Briguglio, who formed part of the Labour Party national executive but was expelled in 1977.
“His economic style of government is now passé and was based on the assumption that government knows better than the private sector.
“This type of economic ideology was common during the 1970s and the 1980s all over the world,” Prof. Briguglio said.
But Mr Mintoff was also a social reformer, he added. Without him Malta would still be a backward country as far as civil rights and the separation of Church and state were concerned.
The social reforms of the 1970s are a lasting legacy to the man, but for others, Mintoffianism will always be another word for bullying and violence.
A trait borne out of circumstances, which saw Mr Mintoff in his earlier years taking on the British colonialists and the Church’s hegemony on social norms, it later became a way of bulldozing change in the first post-independence Labour governments of the 1970s and 1980s.
The violence culminated in the 1979 Black Monday events when then Opposition leader Eddie Fenech Adami’s house was ransacked and his wife beaten in front of their children. It was also the day The Times building in Valletta was gutted by Labour supporters.
It is this unsavoury legacy that dragged on into the 1980s that the Labour Party tried to bury when Alfred Sant was elected leader in the 1990s. He cut loose the violent elements.
Prof. Briguglio acknowledged Mr Mintoff’s biggest weakness as Prime Minister was that he lost control over his violent followers.
“Mintoff sometimes had nasty moods, and as he was rash in his decisions, some were taken in such moods, with disastrous results,” Prof. Briguglio said.
It is unlikely Mintoffianism will ever enter the books as an ideology. It was more akin to the personality cult of a big man in a small country.
But whatever label or definition it is given, the word has transcended the very nature of the man who inspired it and today means different things to different people... and that is very true to Mr Mintoff’s legacy.