Predictable is not necessarily charmless. There was something Archbishop Charles Scicluna said the other day which I could have sworn he would say. And yet when he did, I was entertained enough to resolve to write about it.
He told us that he intends to be “viċin in-nies”. The literal translation is “close to the people” but there are overtones of being at one with them. We had heard it before. It’s become a staple of bishops, politicians, footballers and even Song for Europe winners. I even seem to remember a richly-illustrated hagiography of President George Abela that went by a title in that vein.
The expression is an oath of allegiance to a populism of sorts. In principle it’s a commitment to keeping one’s feet on, and ear to, the ground. In practice it means becoming a standard fixture on Xarabank, doing and being seen to do silly or mundane things (because that how the rest of us live, presumably), being photographed in informal settings and making the right noises on matters of popular appeal.
I doubt Scicluna will deliver. Which is a compliment on my part, because I’ve never quite understood the heroic value of being close to the people in a sardine tin of an island. It’s the standard form and there can be nothing particularly special about it.
I can understand why, say, British politicians might wish to make claims to being normal human beings immersed in popular culture. It’s a context in which distance can be a serious charge. When George Osborne slapped a 20 per cent surcharge on hot pasties in the 2012 Budget, Labour accused – to considerable dividend – coalition politicians of being out of touch with ordinary people.
Let’s say government decided to introduce a surcharge on pastizzi. I don’t imagine anyone would accuse the Prime Minister of being out of touch with the land of flakes and grease, as Labour did with David Cameron and pasties. That’s because we can readily picture Joseph Muscat scoffing down a couple with his Sunday morning tea.
Our politicians are condemned to live close to us and to be at one with us
I’m not making fun of the Prime Minister. My point is that our politicians are condemned to live close to us and to be at one with us. Partly that has to do with the size of the island. I’m not given to cultivating people in power, nor do I consider myself particularly well connected. And yet I am acquainted with, or have met socially, a good number of politicians.
That much is inescapable, but there’s more. It is not surprising that Jeremy Boissevain based his Friends of Friends on fieldwork in Malta (and to a lesser extent in Sicily – but there’s no contradiction there). Fact is, and I really don’t need to go into detail here, that viċin in-nies is the oxygen of Maltese politics.
The Maltese word that sums it up is ‘nafu/nafha’ (I know him/her). The average Maltese person will ‘know’ a good half a dozen politicians; a well-connected one will know scores of them. Exactly what ‘know’ means is another matter. It’s a wonderfully vague word which can mean having met a person once, being married to their second cousin, or running a business front on their behalf.
There’s also a strong visual element to this. Most of us will have seen, at some point in their lives and in some fairly informal context, a Maltese Prime Minister no less.
Mintoff in shorts was a regular show at Delimara. I’ve also seen Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici many times at Prego, Alfred Sant browsing at a bookshop, Eddie Fenech Adami reading the newspaper in Buġibba, and Lawrence Gonzi strolling in Marsascala. Joseph Muscat I once bumped into and spoke to briefly during his MEP campaign.
None of this Prime Minister-watching has anything to do with my exceptional good luck. Rather, it’s simply down to my average blessings as an average Maltese person. Distance? A need to be viċin in-nies? Hardly.
Which leaves us with a problem. There are two reasons why I would actually prefer politicians (and possibly the Archbishop, but that’s a minority interest) to be less, not more, viċin in-nies.
The first has to do with the dignity of office. I’m not saying Fenech Adami should not enjoy the sun, or that Gonzi ought to stick to strolling up and down the house. That bit is unavoidable. It’s when politicians cultivate and make a spectacle out of being viċin in-nies that my eyebrows start shooting up.
I’m not happy to watch a government minister or an Opposition MP make a fool of themselves at a telethon. Nor do I wish to relate to the Prime Minister as ‘Joseph’ or ‘one of us’. My relation to the man is that while he holds the highest elected office in the country, I don’t. It’s a hierarchy I respect tremendously and one which I would be loath to see banalised for the sake of viċin in-nies histrionics.
The second reason is that distance can be a good thing. The logic to the nafu/ nafha model I mentioned earlier is that one can rely on people one knows for privileged access to the goodies of the State. (Words like ‘patronage’ come to mind.) The point is that it probably makes a lot of sense to keep people at arm’s length – unless we want a system of personal favours and pandering, that is.
Then again, it’s quite possible that I’m reading too much into this viċin in-nies business. But if it’s just another example of vacant rhetoric, that’s another reason to bury it.
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