Ever since the general election result, two metaphors have haunted Maltese politics. Both have to do with touch.

It became conventional wisdom that Joseph Muscat was in touch with popular sentiment while the Nationalist Party was out of touch.

Meanwhile, both came to be seen as untouchable: Muscat because of his ability to levitate above the ordinary rules of political give-and-take, the Nationalist Party because it seemed a pariah.

It’s quite usual to be an untouchable pariah and, therefore, out of touch. But the idea that a politician can be, simultaneously, supremely in touch and supremely untouchable smacks of magic and the paranormal.

Or, if you like, woo-woo.

Woo-woo is a word coined by James Randi, also known as the Amazing Randi: a retired stage magician who dedicated his working life to debunking paranormal claims and pseudoscience. He showed how self-proclaimed psychics actually bent spoons and moved objects. No, it isn’t with the power of their mind; it’s thanks to the illusions of yours. Randi made the real machinery transparent.

Maltese politics still awaits its James Randi.

Our politics is full of woo-woo, which does no one any good, least of all the people it exalts because anyone who believes the woo-woo about himself is heading for a great fall.

However, instead of sweeping away the illusions as best we can, we add to them. We’re doing it right now, in the aftermath of the hunting referendum and local council elections.

We’re going from believing that Muscat is untouchable to believing that his power is showing signs of cracking. But both claims peddle their own illusions.

It’s impossible to know if Muscat is or was ever untouchable. Because hardly anyone – least of all the journalists claiming he’s untouchable – has ever made any real attempt to ‘touch’ him.

Take his post-referendum statement to the press.

He solemnly said he told the policing authorities to enforce the law strictly.

I saw no report of someone asking three simple questions: do you tell the police what to do? Are you suggesting this is the first time you’ve given instructions for the law to be enforced strictly? If you’ve always said this, then what’s new this time round?

If a politician doesn’t get asked questions like that, then he’s obviously going to seem untouchable. If no one tries to touch you, you’d be untouchable too.

On the very first outing immediately after the referendum result was out, no sharp questions were asked. Until they are, the aura of untouchability will remain.

But what about the results of the local council elections? Or the environmentalists’ vow that they are the 49 per cent and will make their voting power felt?

Let’s take local council elections first.

Muscat is, strictly speaking, mistaken to say that this is the first time that a government has won these elections.

The PN won in 1999 and 2000 (although it lost votes in the process, having mopped up votes during the 1996-98 Labour government). The PN also did well in 2003, just before the general election.

It won, however, with relative majorities. What is a historic first is that a government has obtained an absolute majority of votes.

It’s impossible to know if Joseph Muscat is or was ever untouchable

What this means is not entirely what Muscat has suggested. The government has managed its feat in part because third-party and independent candidates have been squeezed out; in part by a historic spending campaign.

Therefore, if we want to explain the full mechanics of the victory, and the reasons for the popularity, we should be asking (and answering) questions, like: why is campaign spending going up and why are the new highs affordable when previously they were not?

In a period where the conventional wisdom is that voters are becoming increasingly detached from the major political parties, how come the latter squeezed out the independent candidates?

These are questions about the changing character of our politics. To answer them by appealing to charisma is a bit like explaining a rocket launch by appealing to the magnetic powers of the moon.

None of this means that Labour’s victory in the council elections had nothing to do with government performance. Of course it did.

The government is popular thanks to a formula. It deregulates for special interests – whether it’s lifestyle choices or the building industry. It co-opts important opinion-formers, like the Chamber of Commerce, Enterprise and Industry, by making them business partners.

It offers package deals for the rest of us, with enough sweeteners to make the rest easy to swallow.

It’s a formula that works in the short run because the disadvantages of deregulation – the undermining of oversight, the poisoning of geese laying golden eggs – are only apparent in the longer term. For well over a decade, until the debacle of 2008, everyone thought the deregulation of financial services was a great idea.

There is nothing in the local council election results that suggests that the formula has been found seriously wanting.

The result has been good for the PN because it’s given its activists a taste of blood. Their self-confidence in being able to read the mood of some localities is back and self-confidence is an important asset.

But the effort has simply meant that the PN has returned to the popularity zone once occupied by Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici and Alfred Sant.

Given where the PN was before, it’s an achievement. But we also know that each successive percentage point is much harder to climb than the one immediately preceding it.

What about the assorted environmentalists claiming that the referendum is a turning point?

No, it’s not; at least not if they continue to be content to spout the woo-woo about being on The Right Side of History. That’s no different from the retired colonels and blue-rinses of the Jane Austen Society of Tunbridge Wells claiming they are on The Right Side of Literature.

History has no right side. It favours the just and unjust alike; Genghis Khan and the napalm bombers of Vietnam as much as Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. If Christ was crucified, why should the birds be spared?

In our age, environmentalism has inbuilt political difficulties in mobilising a powerful lobby (the lobby in the European Parliament is an exception for easily explainable reasons).

In an age of individualism and rights, it champions collective responsibility and duties.

In an age of deregulation, it champions regulation.

In an age of slow economic growth, it raises the cost of growth by bringing to light the hidden costs that people want to avert their eyes from.

In an age of short-termism, of the cult of having only one life to live, it speaks of future generations.

Until the Opposition, or the environmentalists, put an actual price to the hidden costs of Muscat’s formula, until they persuade enough voters that the hidden costs are high enough to override the sweeteners, until they can co-opt the media to ask the sharp questions and insist on answers, until then Muscat remains untouchable. Because they’re not really doing anything that can touch him.

ranierfsadni@europe.com