Walking down that aisle of aisles: Republic Street, Valletta. Photo: Matthew MIrabelli

I had a nagging feeling as I read the reports on how tomorrow’s marathon presidential inauguration will unfold. I could see why everyone was saying the ceremonies represented many firsts of their kind. And, yet, somehow I had seen it all before.

Then it came to me. Tomorrow’s events are structured like a wedding, from a bride’s point of view and as lovingly recorded by the wedding video cameraman. You know, the familiar tableauxof hairdresser and make-up, going down the staircase, kissing her mother goodbye, meaningfully shutting the door of the family home behind her, walking up the aisle...

It will all be clearer when we see the footage on Xarabank, where Marie Louise Coleiro Preca will end her day. There, like close friends, we shall watch the wedding video with her and laugh and cry.

We shall see the bride getting ready at home. Bidding farewell to her constituents. Leaving home for a new life. The vulnerable as bridesmaids and witnesses. Walking down that aisle of aisles: Republic Street. The ‘going away’ on the balcony.

Coleiro Preca is marrying the poor. And, given that L-Istrina has established that those of us who aren’t actually poor are usually poor in spirit that means practically all of us.

I’m obviously not saying that Coleiro Preca had a Maltese wedding directly in mind when planning the events. I’m saying that the symbolisation suggests itself naturally because it draws on a familiar cultural repertoire of how to deal with ‘leaving one life behind’ and taking up another.

And perhaps a lifetime of televised royal weddings, which bring together affairs of family and State, unification of families and of nation, also contribute to this repertoire of what seem to be self-evident natural symbols.

It is the wedding analogy that makes sense of two things that would otherwise be inexplicable.

First, why should Coleiro Preca so ostentatiously take leave of her constituents? No incoming president has done it to this degree before. She’s not emigrating; she’s moving up the road. Indeed, freed of ministerial responsibilities and the drudgery of constituency work, she will arguably now have more time to meet the truly needy. Few public roles are as sociable as that of a president.

The wedding analogy, however, shows why the question is misplaced. A husband, having been seated to watch the wedding video for the umpteenth time, knows better than to ask why his wife bid farewell to her mother so tearfully when every day the two continue to spend so much time on the phone together.

The great farewell has nothing to do with losing contact. Quite the reverse; by making the relationship an emblem of virtue, immortalised on film, its continuity is legitimised. (Whereas bridegrooms, who are so careless as to scoot out of the family home without any fuss or photography, will forever as husbands struggle against accusations that their contact with mummy is unhealthy and morally dubious.)

The President is the head of State, not the head of society or nation

As with mother and daughter, so with Coleiro Preca and the multitudes. She will bid them farewell... and thus justify why she will continue to meet them. Argumentatively, it makes no sense. Symbolically, many spectators will find it tear-jerking and satisfying.

The wedding analogy also helps us understand one of the more remarkable things Coleiro Preca has said.

Responding to criticism of the length and elaborate nature of her rite of passage, she insisted that the event will be a symbol of unity and a celebration of “the people, not the person”.

But the ceremony shouldn’t be about ‘the people’. Weddings are about people; the presidential inauguration is about the State, which is the set of institutions that protect the nation, including individual members from the rest of ‘the people’.

Coleiro Preca confused nation and State again in her March 31 speech when she said (or, at least, was reported as saying) that the nation was born with Independence. Of course, it wasn’t.

It’s because we already were a nation – culturally, socially, politically and legally – that we wanted to exercise our right, given by international law, to self-determination.

Coleiro Preca obviously knows this. She’s not saying pre-Independence Maltese nationalists were snake-oil merchants peddling something that did not exist. She knows she was Maltese from birth, in 1958, and that she did not become Maltese only when she was almost six.

The problem is that she seems to have an uncertain grasp of the distinction between nation and nation-State and says one when she means the other. She’s not alone.

A 2011 Nationalist Party document, ‘Our Roots’, published with much fanfare, committed the same howler. In both cases, the media didn’t notice. The confusion seems widespread.

But, up till now, the symbolism of the presidential inauguration wasn’t confused. All the ceremonial focus was on the trappings of the State.

If the conventional ritual is dry, formal, remote and impersonal, it is because it marks the passage in which a well-known individual becomes that paradox: the personification of the impersonality of the State, its transcendent detachment from all parties, factions and particular interests.

In other words, the ritual is not concerned with ‘the soul of society’ as tomorrow’s has been described. The President is the head of State, not the head of society or nation.

Ordinarily, the inauguration of the president is one that marks the ritual shedding of his/her personal identity. It is not his/her conscience that the conventional ceremony dramatises but that of the State and the moment s/he has an irreconcilable conflict of personal conscience s/he must resign.

Coleiro Preca, however, has opted for a ceremony that makes her identity and beliefs ostentatiously visible. She says the ceremony is not about her. True, it’s not about her in any egoistic sense. It’s about her altruism... but the altruism is hers not anyone else’s.

All new presidents, in their inaugural speech, say something about the moral forces that have shaped them. But never has an inauguration put an incoming president’s conscience on display to the extent that we shall see tomorrow.

Whether this is all to the good or not is up to you. However, rituals carry significance beyond the occasion they give rise to. Being absorbing dramatic events, they magnetise and transform the way we think of ourselves.

The ceremony we shall witness tomorrow models the life of the nation on that of the family: the family wedding, family solidarity. That has its virtues, fraternity being the most difficult of the great values to practise in modern society.

But, in privileging society, the ceremony will sideline the State. One of the virtues of the liberal State is that it frees politics from the confines of stifling family-like (or tribal) authority.

Tomorrow’s national white wedding will instead reinforce the idea of family. Let’s hope it doesn’t make our notion of the modern State more elusive than it already is.

ranierfsadni@europe.com