Years before the Arab uprisings of 2011, scholars discussed whether those Arab countries that did have regular elections could be described as democracies without democrats. More elections were taking place more regularly but the behaviour of the ruling regime, which elections never dislodged, remained autocratic while even self-styled liberals didn’t seem to mind if their personal freedoms were protected.

From time to time, the same argument has been made about Malta. Elections are held regularly. People participate enthusiastically. The results are not challenged but people are cynical about what happens between one election and the next.

In effect, they do not expect full democracy – transparency, rule of law, the autonomy of Parliament, accountability, actual separation of powers. They settle for a deeply-flawed democracy without necessarily feeling cheated.

The popular explanations are unconvincing. The blame is allocated to something deep-seated in the collective Maltese psyche (“too many of us are still Arabs at heart”; “too many cultural peasants still around”). They are feeble explanations because Arab and peasant cultures show wide variation across the world and in history.

Political fatalism, when it shows itself, has very identifiable causes. Scholarly careers have been built on identifying both the appearance of certain factors and their consequences.

Maybe that’s what we should try and do for Maltese political culture. Rather than invoke fate, or “deep-seated culture” (fancy shorthand for fate), it seems more fruitful to identify shifts.

There is no doubt that, over the last dozen years or so, Maltese political culture began to undergo reversals with consequences for democratic institutions and culture. The shifts show up in the deteriorating scores on indices like Transparency International’s Perception of Corruption and Freedom House’s scales for press freedom and the legal environment.

The various slides have a history. The nemesis of democratisation is political arbitrariness, which is itself enabled by three key features.

First, power is personalised: it’s the Man (yes, man; machismo is part of it) not the institutions that matter in the final analysis.

Second, the personalisation of power is ratified by the way in which law is transformed: from the rules of the game to one of the pawns on the chessboard.

Third, society is represented as a family. It’s done to show that the leaders care. However, families are not democracies. The parents provide but, since they provide, they wield ultimate authority.

It’s rarely mentioned but, in Malta, up till the first Fenech Adami administration (1987-1992) the power of ministers at law was strikingly symbolised at the law courts. If a minister testified, he did so seated on the bench beside the judge (a colonial legacy). Just think of what that meant for cross-examination.

The nemesis of democratisation is political arbitrariness

After 1971, under Dom Mintoff, the symbolism of controlling ministerial power was made more potent. Anyone wanting to sue a ministry had effectively to sue the minister.

Meanwhile, in the same period, political clientelism was changing in character. Like any political practice, it is hardly timeless. For many decades, politicians tended to use (even sacrifice) their professional career and goods to further their political ambitions.

The stories of the personally hard-up Enrico Mizzi (of whom it’s still said that dying in office gave him a funeral his family might not have been able to afford) and Giorgio Borg Olivier (who hung on for so long as PN leader in part because he felt he could not afford to retire) emanate from this period.

By the 1970s, a new pattern of clientelism was becoming dominant. Now, politics furthered the pursuit of private economic interests. It is still the dominant pattern today, even though there are some active politicians who have sacrificed their professional career for public life.

To trace such developments is the opposite of depicting fate. It shows that what seems inevitable had a beginning. It shows what needs to change for it to end. Culture, far from being intractable, can be shaped by institutional organisation and symbolism.

After 1987, some movement towards democratisation – the dispersal of power, the depiction of society as made up of overlapping civil society groupings in structured dialogue with each other – began. Not mysteriously but thanks to changes in law and practice.

Skipping over the years, however, we can see it unravelling. Forget motives and blame games for the moment. Just look at what we have.

Personalisation of power? Public service positions have been redescribed as positions of trust. The notion of loyalty to the public interest has been erased. What is left is only whether the minister can trust you. All this while many such positions are plainly rewards for being a member of the minister’s retinue.

Law as a pawn in the game rather than rules of the game? The copious use of legal notices on controversial matters to bypass Parliament have emasculated the House while many government backbenchers have accepted appointments that conflict with their role as their constituents’ watchdog.

Society as family? Structured social dialogue is being replaced with sessions with a listening Prime Minister (or Cabinet) who takes notes and interprets consensus as he sees fit, overruling current processes if necessary.

It’s how Muammar Gaddafi used to operate. I am not – repeat, not – drawing an equivalence between Joseph Muscat and Gaddafi, which would be ridiculous. I’m pointing out the similarity of one of their key practices.

And the consequence is the same: in the process, the capacity of people to represent themselves collectively (and, hence, with political effectiveness) is whittled to their being able to represent their personal case. One is grateful to be heard and understood.

Moving on, when the office of President of the Republic essentially becomes the head office of the leading national charity, then what we face is the dissolution of the State into a family.

Instead of a State committed to welfare to which we have rights, politicians and the President give us gifts for which we are to be grateful. It’s a transference from gratitude to a bountiful God, who gives freely, to gratitude to bountiful politicians, who give us what is ours.

Secularisation, in this sphere, has turned out to be a shift from obligations to a transcendent God to obligations to worldly political idols. Liberty, eh?

How did we end up here? The roots predate 2013.

No one did as much as Eddie Fenech Adami to insist on politics as public service as an ethos in which the politician gives something back to the community. However, the gratitude many people felt for his personal sacrifices helped transform the notion of public service into one for which voters should be grateful for.

Lesser politicians then began to present their public service as a ‘sacrifice’ or ‘gift’ to voters.

The financial perilousness of the political parties made them appeal to donors as members of the same ‘family’. The success of L-Istrina was based on the same imagery.

From a position of electoral weakness, the PN presented first Mater Dei Hospital and then the Piano Parliament House as gifts to the people. The same discourse is now being wielded by Muscat from a position of strength.

None of these developments took away our vote. But they have changed our self-image. They have made it more difficult to imagine ourselves as real democrats. So how can we insist on real democracy?

ranierfsadni@europe.com

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