So, the government head of communications, Kurt Farrugia, signs off a hatchet piece on the Opposition leader, wishing him good riddance in the pages of this newspaper. Loud protests follow, including an editorial. The protests are justified. But is the diagnosis?
Farrugia serves the government of Malta. It’s true his boss, the Prime Minister, is also the Labour leader. But Farrugia’s job is to communicate what the government is doing, not what the Labour Party thinks. What Farrugia did was an abusive blurring of the lines.
Farrugia knows this well. There was a time when Labour, then in opposition, raised a fuss when the then Nationalist Party secretary general, Joe Saliba, was seen entering the Office of the Prime Minister, Lawrence Gonzi, for a meeting.
The PN in office adhered to a distinction, largely kept, between party and government – for example, Eddie Fenech Adami and Gonzi held party-related meetings at the PN headquarters – and Labour held the PN to that distinction.
Attacks of the kind that Farrugia launched at Simon Busuttil aren’t new. Nor is the PN innocent of them. But hitherto they were reserved for the party-owned media and signed off by party hacks, not government officials.
Farrugia’s critics know the distinction as well. They also know that he knows. Which is why, perhaps, they have attributed his op-ed piece to hubris, the overweening arrogance that, in the end, always brought down the heroes of Greek tragedy.
The critics also know that Farrugia is unlikely to have published such an article without seeking permission. Indeed, the idea – perhaps not even the draft – of such an article is unlikely to have originated with him. So the critics have attributed hubris to Labour in the flush of its second landslide victory.
Hubris is a tempting diagnosis. The (attempted) humiliation of a victim, or loser, by a victor – the crowing, the insolent, contemptuous treatment, for the sheer pleasure of it – this runs deep and glimmers attractively in Maltese imagination. Why be content with mere victory if you can step on your adversary’s neck and tear the shirt off his back?
The ancient Greeks were as familiar with hubris as we are. They also thought of it as naive. Aristotle wrote witheringly of those ‘naive men’ who think their superiority would seem all the greater by their ill-treatment of others.
Meanwhile, the epics and tragedies spoke of hubris as a lack of contact with reality. The hubristic hero was the one who, blinded by conceit to defy the gods, was en route to a great fall.
But, just because hubris is a recognisably Maltese vice, it doesn’t mean it’s operative here. It’s tempting to discern it. The conceit seems there. The dangerousness is there. But what evidence is there of a coming downfall?
None. It’s one thing to talk about the economy, where Labour’s economic decisions, based on wishing away the business cycle, truly seem to defy the gods. But Farrugia’s piece is another thing.
For the Greeks, hubris was an individual failing, not a group’s. Yet Farrugia’s piece was a corporate decision. There’s more.
The same message has been relayed, unrelentingly, at the same time, by two other henchmen associated with the Office of the Prime Minister. Glenn Bedingfield has repeatedly pressed the point on his blog. And Alex Muscat, the new Labour MP (and, preposterously, deputy chief of staff at OPM) wrote a piece along the same lines for a different newspaper the same weekend.
It’s tempting to discern hubris. The conceit seems there. The dangerousness is there. But what evidence is there of a coming downfall?
And, alongside those articles you can place another unusual piece that appeared after the election, by the economy minister and Labour deputy leader, Chris Cardona, who wrote another hatchet piece on the PN’s finances for the English-language press.
(Again, such a piece has precedents, on both sides of the partisan divide, but they used to appear only in the party-owned media, and never signed by a minister or deputy leader.)
What we have here are talking points, not strutting. Open-eyed strategy, not psychological blindness. A cold-eyed message from the top, not political theatre for one’s own core vote.
To understand what’s happening we need to look at a different set of emotions. In 1969, Elisabeth Kuebler-Ross famously suggested that grieving after a death followed five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
The PN’s supporters have just passed through a traumatic political death. I suggest that Labour’s strategy is to exploit these five stages to press its advantage.
The PN is getting over its stage of denial – where many people just couldn’t believe the scale of the defeat was possible without electoral fraud.
Not everyone goes through the five stages in the usual order but it is common enough. The anger is beginning to rise among the councillors and party members who will be voting for a new leader this summer. It is palpable in the meetings that the leadership candidates are holding with their electorate in the party clubs.
Here’s the interesting thing. The anger is expressed not only at Labour. It’s also addressed at the perceived shortcomings of the outgoing party administration.
Pieces such as those by Cardona – which alleged mismanagement of party funds, nepotism and generous salaries for a few people – are aimed at channelling the anger that accompanies any grief.
Cardona’s piece has other implications. It applies pressure on the party administration. If the PN’s creditors believe him, they could squeeze the party more than it can endure. His piece also hints that more pressure can follow, unless the administration changes tack.
For those in the new administration whose grief is, therefore, in the stage of bargaining (with the new reality), it will be tempting to seek to arrive at a semi-truce with Labour. A detente, where one party scales back its attacks on debt, while the other scales back on graft and Panama.
Farrugia’s piece was crude in portraying Busuttil as isolated. But who’s to say that the crudity was not intentional? The sheer audacity – the transgressing of the accepted lines of attack – might plausibly achieve what the article claims to be merely describing.
The audacity might silence some leaders of the vocal opposition. And the rest, already prone, might be depressed into thinking there is no leadership, so why bother?
Finally, there is acceptance. Already, expectations about the magisterial inquiries, including Egrant, are being massaged. If little is expected, should one protest if little comes out of them?
If it’s repeated enough times that the Egrant allegations are Busutttil’s attempted frame-up of Joseph Muscat, will people forget that the story had legs not just because Daphne Caruana Galizia broke it?
Caruana Galizia’s claims certainly electrified attention. But the legs came when the man running the bank was filmed coming out of it with a bag in the dead of night; when other reports of the bank’s relaxed ways surfaced; and when Pierre Portelli, of Standard Publications, said he too had seen the crucial documents at the core of the case.
The Egrant allegations do not rest on one person’s claims alone. But if one’s attention is occupied by anger, bargaining and depression, it becomes easier to accept that the allegations are one person’s.
Identifying hubris as the explanation behind Farrugia’s op-ed doesn’t just miss the point. It raises the false hope – for this government’s adversaries – that Labour is losing touch with reality. That it’s beginning to expose a collective psychological weakness.
Far from it, it’s exploiting psychological knowledge, not showing a lack of it. It’s just won a second landslide victory but it’s already preparing for the next one.
ranierfsadni@europe.com