The received wisdom was that Joseph Muscat was a great marketeer who had managed to “persuade” the electorate to swallow his meritocracy/inclusivity/moderateness spiel hook, line, sinker, rod and angler, to say nothing of the quay on which the angler was perched.
Muscat’s gargantuan faux pas in embracing, quite literally, the criminal Engerer put paid to that little myth, at least insofar as thinking electors are concerned.
That your common or garden elector doesn’t, actually, think all that hard is proven in evidence by the poll that came out last Sunday which said that something on the lines of 18% of the electorate would still consider the criminal Engerer worthy of their vote, but that’s by the by.
You can’t, for the love of all that’s beautiful, witness Muscat giving Engerer an enormous hug and then still think he (Muscat) has the electorate’s pulse at his fingertips.
When he went and did an Alfred Sant and tried his damnedest to insult the collective feelings of the massed ranks of Labour’s stalwarts, the Soldiers of Steel, now relegated to the status of Tin Soldiers by having Engerer ranked amongst them, Muscat went from bad to worse and he’s now having to fall back on his laurels (instead of falling on his sword) by turning the MEP election into a head-to-head between him and Simon Busuttil.
Let’s make no bones about it: Labour will win the MEP Election with something between 20,000 and 25,000 votes ahead. Joseph Muscat’s up-cocks, many as they were and bringing on him the displeasure no less of pundits such as Martin Sciculuna, Marlene Farrugia, Claire Bonello, Michaela Spiteri and Lino Spiteri, though the latter more than slightly obliquely, will not suffice for the electorate to extend two fingers arranged in the time-honoured fashion in his general direction.
He is their “Joseph Joseph Joseph” and no amount of flogging citizenship, throwing our (not his, our) money around to knock a measly two cents off the price of petrol and increase stipends by no less than a miserly €16 per year (yes, that’s per year) and hand out stupid €110 cheques from our money and other little tricks will persuade them otherwise.
So he’ll win, and he’ll win well but what he wants, touchingly child-like as he is, is for his new toy, his 36,000 advantage, to remain untouched.
It won’t, so he has to give himself a fall-back position, something to grin and look smug about, a feat he finds it extremely difficult to pull off, I don’t think.
This is what has led Joseph Muscat into unilaterally turning the contest into one between him and Busuttil. It’s not the fear of not getting a majority: you’d have to be an unmitigated moron to think that Labour can, even in the Nationalists’ wildest dreams, lose a 36,000 majority, though I will willingly sign myself off as A. Moron Esq. for at least five editions of this blog, because it would mean that Muscat has no option but to resign and call an election.
Not going to happen.
No, what has led Muscat into his unilateral, and frankly childish, “yah boo sucks to you” jibe at Busuttil, who quite rightly treated it with the contempt it deserved, was the prospect of being able to chant “beat you, beat you, beat you” on Sunday night or whenever the MEP election results come out, thereby dazzling his crowd and the media, the latter apparently so easily dazzled still by Muscat’s prestidigitations, into not noticing that the result was three-three and that he’d lost a goodly chunk of thousands of voters from the ranks of the faithful.
The only consolation is that Muscat is so convinced that he and he alone is right in everything that he does that he will take the numerical victory as validation of his policies and keep ploughing on regardless. The downside to that is that he’ll be ploughing our furrows, using our money and endangering our economy.