On one occasion in 2002, Dom Mintoff – who was then campaigning to keep Malta out of the EU – was asked why he had brought down the Labour government. His answer was that he had done nothing of the sort.
It was, he said, Alfred Sant’s pig-headedness that had led to the 1998 snap election. Sant had been fed the results of polls by a certain Phil Noble, an American consultant who at the time was in Labour’s employ. The polls, which Mintoff apparently was privy to, indicated that an election would be a breezy victory for Labour. Certain that he would win and condemn Mintoff to exile in Delimara, Sant tied the Vittoriosa yacht marina matter to a vote of confidence.
History repeats itself only very occasionally, and then only in part. Still, the moral of Mintoff’s story is that political legerdemain is unpredictable and risky business. Elections were not invented to help Sant get rid of Mintoff.
Nor were they invented for the current incumbent to be able to worm his way out of a sticky situation. That, however, is exactly what we’ve ended up with. Aware that his party is haemorrhaging support, and possibly alerted of things to come that would speed up the bleeding, the Prime Minister has called it.
Which leaves many people with a very big problem. Muscat has essentially told us that we can only throw out the bathwater if we also throw out the baby. The only way we can show our disgust at the goings-on at the very top is by doing away with Labour entirely and electing the Nationalist Party. (There’s no coalition, by the way – it’s the PN with Marlene Farrugia thrown in.)
In a way it was inevitable, because the Labour Party post-2008 is effectively Joseph Muscat. That is not to say that the rest are useless, or that any one person can be greater than their party. The point is that all the talk of moviment, national reconciliation and tagħna lkoll, draws on Muscat’s image and his image alone. Rhetorical or not (and it is), the moviment is meaningless without Muscat.
The only way we can show our disgust at the goings-on at the very top is by doing away with Labour entirely and electing the Nationalist Party
The best account we have of the state of the art is that peddled every other day on television by Robert Musumeci. Musumeci is the Goebbels of the moviment. He’s the one who dresses its creed, such as it is, in the borrowed robes of a vertebrate ideology and brings it to the masses. Throughout, the message is that the moviment is nothing without its guide.
Be that as it may, there was no way Muscat was ever going to let Labour go ahead without him. He has often said that he intends to retire after two terms in office. Perhaps what he really meant was that he won’t go before that, come what may.
That he ought to go is not in question. Let’s say we give Muscat the benefit of the doubt on the Egrant matter. That leaves us with the Keith Schembri investigation as well as the Mizzi-Schembri Panama accounts. No room for doubt there. The least Muscat could have done is fire the two. The fact that he didn’t shifts the sights on him, as a Prime Minister who defends the politically and criminally indefensible.
I met someone the other day who told me how he wished the election campaign were a normal one – by which he meant a few months of bickering, empty promises and uninvited house guests. That anyone should miss such a circus is very telling indeed.
The only thing that’s normal about this election is Konrad Mizzi’s corned beef and Oreo hampers. Take policy pledges, that in normal circumstances matter to people (pinch of salt at hand at all times, of course). This time, it seems, nobody cares. Busuttil and Muscat on cannabis and prostitution, for example, makes them sound like a two-man Montmartre, circa 1905. No matter. They may as well each cut off an ear and send it to Musumeci, and no one would notice.
Which is tragic, because it means we’ll be voting at cross purposes. On the one hand, Busuttil is right to say that this election is about principles rather than pledges. The main principle is that we cannot have a Prime Minister who defends the politically and criminally indefensible.
And yet, the outcome of the election will also be a government and its policies. In healthy circumstances, election pledges serve as a rough indication of those policies. Normally, politicians take care to come up with pledges that sound reasonable and are properly thought-out and costed.
This time, what we have are proposti as a kind of simulation, a keeping up of pretence. And, because everyone knows that the real question is elsewhere, no one cares. June 3 is effectively a referendum on whether or not to keep Joseph Muscat, with the small matter of five years of government as an afterthought.
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