The Friday before the European Parliament elections I placed a stakeless bet with some students in a course of mine on nationalism that Norman Lowell would get many thousands of votes.

Hand on heart, I can’t really say my bet was the result of precise assessment. Still, and probably with the benefit of hindsight, there are a couple of arguments that might explain Lowell’s strong performance. They may appear contradictory but then Imperium Europa is not the most vertebrate of creatures.

The first point is that much of what Lowell says may be extreme, but it is not fundamentally different in substance from what the rest of us think.

Take Imperium Europa’s campaign spot, which was censored because it said that African immigrants pose a health hazard. Sounds and is terrible, but in what way is it different from the ranks of government people whose job it is to receive migrants on shore, and who dress up for the occasion – in surgical gloves and masks?

I’m told by my friends who work with immigrants that the standard response they get when they tell people what they do is, “ara tieħu xi marda ta” (“be careful not to get a disease”). And so on.

Lowell is also fond of saying that African immigrants are, and will always be, scroungers who live off the hard work of the Maltese. The word he uses is “jissugaw”, which means to suck blood as leeches do. In other words, that dependency is an endemic condition of Africans.

I really think that his thought is very mainstream on this one. Well-meaning people routinely present us with an Africa in which people just lie about and die of hunger, unless we rescue them (strictly in situ, of course). Xarabank was busy peddling pictures of bloated children and lepers in Tanzania, the night before the European Parliament election. Good intentions? Probably, but we know the rest.

Whenever I talk to someone who has been to Africa, I get the same thing: that giraffes and zebras are lovable dears, and that “hemm il-faqar” (“there’s poverty wherever you look”). And, given that giraffes are not known for their philanthropy, it is only the Maltese who can save Africans. Little wonder then that Lowell’s line on leeches and such is so convincing.

Another gem in his cache is that Africans are primitive. Very, very unoriginal. It is, in fact, standard thought for most of us, usually disguised as the ubiquitous expression ‘għadhom lura’ (‘they’re backward’). Then again, how many of us have ever bothered to read anything about African art, or music, or political systems? Lowell, who fancies himself as an artist and aesthete, displays a supreme ignorance of all of these. Trouble is, he is hardly alone.

One final example: Lowell is always going on about how “unassimilable” Africans are and how misguided some people are to talk about integration. Yet again, he is in excellent company. Think of detention and open centres and gates and fences and the million other ways in which immigrants are sectioned and removed from general circulation. Are not these simply institutionalised variations on a theme?

My point is that Lowell is not that outlandish after all. His diatribes are grafted onto a stock of popular wisdom which is nourished and cultivated by respectable people who do not wear black and do not carry walking sticks. It is also one which is deep-rooted in historical suspicions and supremacisms of the most insidious kind. I suppose the general feeling is that his touch ain’t delicate, but it’s fair.

Which brings me to the second point. I don’t think that the bulk of those 7,000+ were protest votes. That’s just a narcissistic fantasy of the two parties, who seem to think that everything that happens is about them.

Nor do I think they were just about migration. Josie Muscat’s Azzjoni Nazzjonali was very anti-immigrant. It also stood a better chance of getting something done on migration than Lowell ever will, on account of the public standing and resources of its members. And yet it nosedived into oblivion. Imperium Europa’s own Arlette Baldacchino and Antoine Galea are not exactly pro-immigrant but they look set to follow suit.

The only way to understand the Lowell vote is to take into account, surprise surprise, Lowell himself. A couple of years ago, Mark Micallef (chief journalist with Times of Malta) and I did some scholarly research on the Maltese far right. It didn’t surprise us to find that Lowell was profoundly attractive to substantial chunks of the population.

What did rather take us aback was the fact that a good many of his followers (of both the closeted and out types) thought Imperium Europa was a bizarre pipe dream. They had no time for the colonies on Mars, the genetic reconstruction of the ancient Athenians, or the relocation of Jews to New Caledonia.

It is well-known that far-right groups in Europe and elsewhere thrive on aesthetics and gut-felt emotions

And yet they found themselves attracted to the man himself. His manner of speaking, his self-proclaimed Bohemian lifestyle, his archaisms, his upturned collars and walking sticks, all struck a chord. The point is that there is a sense in which Lowell is a work of art that appeals to aesthetic sensibilities. More a Hieronymus Bosch than a Titian perhaps, but never mind.

One wouldn’t wish to over-simplify, but it appears that the market for the tinpot Bosch is particularly strong among disaffected (but not necessarily jobless or uneducated) youngish men with a penchant for uniforms, warlike symbols, heroic fantasies, and the like. I don’t think that accounts for the full 7,000, but it does explain some.

It is well-known that far-right groups in Europe and elsewhere thrive on aesthetics and gut-felt emotions. Only these emotions include not just hatred and anger and the usual suspects, but rather things like sensuality and pride. There is some good writing in this vein on the far-right RSS (National Volunteer Organisation) group in India, for example. It brings to mind Luchino Visconti’s film The Damned and its long sequences of merrymaking and joie de vivre among Nazi SA units.

All of which I take as good news. I earlier argued that there is a strong dose of Lowell in mainstream wisdom and political projects. That was the worrying bit. The relief is that Lowell’s charisma and magnetism will die with him. (I don’t necessarily mean actual physical death; in spite of everything, I don’t wish the man harm.) Far-right groups are almost always ships that pass in the night.

Which also means we would be ill-advised to ‘listen’ to those 7,000 votes by getting tough on migration or some such. The Prime Minister said on television last Thursday that the Lowell vote conveys a message that politicians ought to take seriously. If he meant we should tackle the Lowell in the mainstream, I agree. A different reading would turn us all into a vast Bosch canvas.

mafalzon@hotmail.com