Politics has really turned out into tasteless dough recently, an inflated, tactless, indelicate and unfair way of describing a process that to my understanding could only be noble in sense and substance.

I have often repelled and battled arguments conveyed by many that talk about politics as being a useless, or even more, an obstacle to social headway. I have relentlessly believed that change in our communities comes from politics and these transformations depend essentially on this pursuit. But now I am seriously starting to doubt my own convictions and whether “they” were right and “I” was wrong.

The useless hubbub that we have seen unfold these last months has been too ill-chosen to swallow. The Franconian shooting from the hip, the ridiculous one-man election jesting, the Parliament that has dried all of its flowers, a budget that still needs to be rubber stamped (in March!), local council elections turned battlefield and frenetic people crying out from all corners of this little island of ours to make their Facebook pages and blogs as badly hit as possible.

This is simply a distortion of what affirmative politics is really about and should represent. This is not the politics of the people. This is partisan politics that the President of Malta, George Abela, spoke so eloquently about during my radio show Ghandi x’ Nghid on Radju Malta a couple of Satur-days ago.

He referred to our political system as based almost in its entirety on the phenomenon of “partitokrazija”. He talked about the danger of having to resort to the Italian (botched) model of politics if we are not vigilant and heedful. This would mean that we would have to take away the reigns of political manufacturing from the hands of those who (should) have the role to do politics and move towards having a political scenario decreed by specialists and technocrats, based solely on deed rather than dialectic.

The President during my show spoke at length about the need to have a new form of “politics-making”, an innovative approach of engaging with the matters that should be placed on our agenda and soaking up our attention. For example, he questioned the efficacy of the Commission for the Administration of Justice, the effectiveness and contextual relevance of our Constitution, the weights and controls that are overseeing our social land-scape, the trials our societal and personal economies are facing, in other words the urgent need to have a critical debate on all of these leitmotifs.

The President also questioned why the main political parties are ostensibly alienated and disengaged from these debates and seem more interested in what is turning out to be “strategic” rather than showing an “interest” in the public wellbeing. It is useless gabbing about a country which is in need of a vision. We are blessed with being a small country, sustained by a bundle of values that we have kept strong and well-grounded. This should be enough in itself to take us forward.

Our politicians need to have a fundamental and unswerving interest in making of our country a better place to live in.

If the politicians we are producing are unable to guarantee this, then it’s a very simple and forthright inference: their place should be elsewhere.

We cannot have bickering politics anymore. We cannot be speaking about the same things, surreptitiously agreeing but yet making it sound as if we are on two opposite polarities austerely to reinforce distinctions rather than cohesion, solidity and interconnection.

What do I propose?

First, invest in political schools on a national basis;

Second, more academics need to be enticed into engaging with the political processes (too few and far between voice their positions and academics are in essence paid to think, research and debate);

Third, rekindle an eagerness for genteel social dialogue;

Fourth, parties need to have the courage to pigpen poli-tical careerists;

Fifth, political parties need to go back to the drawing board and re-align a political landscape that should be cloaked in the principles of freedom, of choice, of liberty and of respect;

Sixth, we need to look at the notion of community development as a basic response to a virtuous quality of life. Political parties do not own our brains. Their mission is to enable people to come to terms with alternatives and picks.

The dough is tasteless and verging on the bitter. I encourage people to choose the politics of quality and not of quantity, of attribute and not of mass. This is a shared social responsibility we all have. Citizens need to pay heed that the power is in the hands of the people – let’s not give it away so easily!

www.andrewazzopardi.org

Senior Lecturer, Department of Youth and Community Studies.