In this island, where time has a propensity to stand still and inertia is next of kin to paralysis, politicians of the old school struggle in defence of the status quo. Brutally described, their role is to man the dam that holds the tide of progress.
Maltese party politics have been transformed in an exercise in sleight of hand
Many a reader is likely to be taken aback by the foregoing but the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
The point I propose to elaborate is that, over time, Maltese party politics have been transformed in an exercise in sleight of hand. The electorate is involved in a game of Chinese mirrors. It is promised the earth plus pie in the sky. It is assured that the economy is steadily moving forward in the right direction.
Electoral inebriation, stimulated at the right time, reaches such a pitch that unkept promises are forgotten or set aside and new ones are introduced to sustain morale.
Eighteen years ago, at the end of a hot July, I tried to take measure of this game of political illusion. Writing in another newspaper (The Malta Independent, July 30, 1995) I described how the electorate has been taken for a long, long ride by what I described as the Potemkin Syndrome.
I recalled the memory of Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin (1739-1781) who served Empress Catherine the Great of Russia in a number of capacities – as minister, chancellor, administrator and friend.
He was so concerned for the happiness of the empress, and also, perhaps, for his personal image, that he arranged for her to hear only good news from her subjects. He also wanted her to be pleased with his stewardship.
He is reputed to have built phony pleasant villages along routes travelled by the empress. He saw to it that the villages where the empress had to stop were inhabited by ‘happy’ peasants.
Potemkin achieved immortality thanks to his original device. The term Potemkin Village has been assimilated in the language of political science to denote artificially-contrived displays where guile succeeds with the help of artificiality or even a degree of deception.
The temptation to build Potemkin villages has prevailed in a number of countries. The deception could come from governments and their agencies as well as from non-government quarters. Shakespeare summed it all up in Hamlet: “One may smile, and smile, and be a villain.”
Eighteen years ago, I pinpointed various Maltese Potemkin villages, which had served their purpose by 1995. Some of them are still disfiguring our landscape, like ghosts from the ugly past.
The remains of the former Royal Opera House stand like an abandoned bride at the entrance of our capital city, more than half a century after the end of World War II. They embarrass the string of politicians who repeatedly undertook to restore the site to its former grandeur.
The Malta Environment and Planning Authority has proved to be another major star in the Potemkin constellation. It built its own head offices to cause a permanent scar on the aesthetics of the Floriana outer fortifications. The ceaseless wonders attributed to Mepa have been at the centre of national frustration and the focus of massive popular complaints, for which there seems to be no solution.
There are various other Potemkin villages. One carries the name of a crafts village. The other is the promised close-down of the Marsa power station.
Their common distinctive feature is that they represent ‘visions’, beautifully projected on paper, while the electorate is short-changed.
Perhaps the incarnation of Prince Potemkin in Malta is the Maltese civil service. It has made big claims about modernisations and reform. The millions of euros invested in revised salary scales have not been matched by all-round efficiency and productivity.
Although there has been time enough to send top civil servants for special training, there has been no significant, tangible input at managerial level. As a result, the country has often had to navigate by guess and by god, relying on calculations and, sometimes, hunches, and plenty of rhetoric, at times enhanced by ministerial whims.
Ministers continue to be singularly adept at doing a Potemkin at the snap of their fingers, They publish glossy literature galore and any number of annual reports, basking in the expectation that they will be applauded by ‘happy peasants’ and of finding favour with their empress.
“That’s how the status quo prevails.
“The more Potemkin villages
“the more will time stand still.
“The more there is stagnation,
the more there is frustration.”