I am baffled by the fact that 46 per cent of the delegates of a party that three months ago ran an electoral campaign on the issue of corruption following the allegations made by a blogger on a number of senior government figures voted for a candidate about whom the same blogger made certain allegations (which he has denied).

Had it been Labour delegates instead of PN ones, the same paradoxical outcome would probably have ensued. This indicates a malaise that goes beyond a particular party.

In a 2015 publication, I had argued that democracy is undergoing a crisis, not because there is some regime that wants to curtail the right to elect a government but for other reasons, like having parties that fundamentally adopt the same ideology and that caters for the interests of the same classes and sets of people. I claimed that this renders exercises like going to the polls futile since, regardless of who is in power, we will ultimately get the same political recipe.

Today, I feel the situation is much worse, with parties not even trying to contrast each other on single issues or on the modus operandi of how to run the public thing.

What is deafening in all this is, bar some exceptions, the silence of the so-called intellectuals and academics. Such groups only spring to public life when the hegemonic relations that ultimately guard their niches are under threat.

Our literati either prefer to limit their efforts to conferences or literary evenings, which have nothing to do with what is going on out there (hence, turning a blind eye to the concrete world) or, I don’t know whether it’s worse, self-appoint themselves as de facto party apparatchiks, churning out platitudes, myths and injunctions they know will earn them the applause of the most of idiotic of supporters, which, apparently, they savour.

That the electoral contest is turning into something akin to whether one supports Liverpool or Man U seems to worry no one.

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