Unlike other post-election periods, this one does not have the benefit of a government comfortably and securely installed nor an opposition soundly beaten, cowed and inward looking. There is no new beginning feeling, 100- day count to allow the new government the benefit of the doubt; there is no novelty factor.
The government party that made it to power by the skin of its teeth after pulling absolutely all the stops, continues in election mode long after the issue has been settled. Lawrence Gonzi's declaration of his desire to be the Prime Minister for all of Malta is denied by the continued thrust of his party's propaganda epitomised not by the emissions of its official organs but by the overflow of hatred, ridicule and contempt in the scribblings of its apologists, its hired character assassins and the less than subtle bias of the self-styled independent media under its unyielding control. It elicits an equal and opposite response.
The expected climax stopped just short of relief and the brief joy anticipated at the moment of victory has been prolonged to become the agony of a victor who has not won. In 1981, the consequence of deliberate gerrymandering was a false victory for Labour; power without legitimacy.
Almost 30 years later, the effects of that complete disorientation, the deep trauma suffered by that part of the population which lived in fear, whose island home felt like a prison, have determined the result of the 2008 election. Alfred Sant was made the peg on which the ancient horrors were exposed to view. His own shortcomings may have helped his enemies to a very great extent but he was only the wax doll used as an amulet to invoke the demons, wraiths and ghouls of our past lurking in our present. It worked like magic.
The very fact that it worked so well may be the most devastating feature of the 2008 election which exposed the bare bones of our political situation. We are unable to overcome our past.
I will be the last to deny that the nightmare was real and that the monsters once walked abroad. I documented it. I compiled the Human Rights Report for Malta 1984. I co-edited it with Richard Cachia Caruana. I have stood face to face and conversed with many of the victims of those years. As a law reporter, I heard the testimony of countless victims of human rights abuses. As editor of Alternattiva, I revisited the horror in detail when it was almost gone. It happened and no amount of effort to paint it pink will ever suffice.
It will never be possible to forgive and forget. Labourites who have no inkling of the fear, who lived an altogether different experience of their country in those years or who are too young to imagine what it was like, cannot communicate with the other half. Their leadership labours under an illusion if it believes that it has done enough. The 2008 election results clearly deny it. It must do more, much more and fast unless it chooses to rely on time to heal all wounds at further risk to its ambitions.
That much seems clear. What is less obvious is that the present insecure government is in danger of repeating the disasters of its 1981 predecessor in 2008 fashion. Not by illegal arrest and police brutality, not by bombings and total monopoly of the media. No. Those were the excesses of another era. In third millennium Malta, a full member of the EU, those options do not exist even if anyone were unwise enough to be tempted to go for them.
Casting aside the spectacular and unforgettable effects of abuse of power in the 1980s, it is the abuse itself which must be kept at bay. Untrammelled power and government insecurity make a lethal mix. The ingredients are the same.
Instead of arresting tens to terrify tens of thousands, we have character assassins on the loose. No claim is too false, no lie is too base, no slur is too disgusting to make. The dirty work is never done directly, paternity for the darkest deeds is never acknowledged but, it is a new form of state-sponsored terrorism. Not a bomb, no. Still, tens of thousands watch while the victims are splattered to pieces. They may even be entertained by the spectacle but, somewhere at the back of their minds they realise that they too may end up that way.
When the Prime Minister, after the election was over, repeated his allegation that I had collected tax money and kept it to myself, I was terrified: We have lost the compass once more. I know that the allegation is false. I know that I can fight and win a libel suit but that is beside the point. It will take time and what is engineered now will have effect long before Dr Gonzi loses the case. That seems to have been his calculation. This was several steps beyond remote character assassination.
It feels very much like 1985 when I compiled that human rights report. The threat of imprisonment for the non-filing of VAT returns for a company of which I had no management or control and from which I made no gain at all is only marginally worse than the sensation that these islands are once more my prison. Dom Mintoff did not even know that I existed; Dr Gonzi speaks my name on television. It feels worse than 1985.
This exercise of power quite apart from its effect on innocent bystanders, the closing of partisan ranks and the consolidation of patronage ties for increased security, reveals a mindset, vicious, fearful, unpredictable because it has overstepped the limits once assumed. Nationalists at the heart of the matter have always known their own party to be ruthless. It is feared by its dissidents and its retribution is condoned by its adherents as a necessary evil. While the mass remains in denial about its less than cuddly qualities, the post-election scenario may be bringing it all out into the open.
My own case may be nothing more than a nine-day wonder in the chronology of Maltese politics but it does indicate that the beast, unchained once more in the election campaign, remains at large. It may already be beyond control. The implied intolerance of one-party rhetoric infecting debate, comment and official statements is horribly familiar.
It is the fascism of thought which allows too many of us to think, talk and act as though a single party political landscape was a desirable, if unachievable ideal. The boundaries have been stretched in the 2008 election campaign and there is no indication that any effort will be made to restore them. The government is in seek-and-destroy mode. We have been here before. This is where I never wanted to return.
It will be impossible to make the government party understand that its own future depends on its ability to shift gear and into reverse. Everything points to a sanitised repetition of the 1980s. In 30 years' time it will be impossible to make Nationalists understand what it was like to be a dissident, their opponent. They will not believe it when they are told. There will not be enough of them around to recall the feeling when it was their turn long before. Like Labourites today, they will be baffled to lose election after election because of excesses committed decades before. It is almost impossible to recognise the faults of your own side in a political scenario dominated by polarisation for more than three generations. Try it. It could prevent history repeating itself.
Dr Vassallo is chairman of Alternattiva Demokratika - the Green Party.
www.alternattiva.org.mt, www.adgozo.com