There are two pitfalls to looking at the results of elections. The first is the charge of hindsight (“Why didn’t you say so before?”). I don’t think this need detain us. It would be a dubious pathologist who did a post-mortem before the event.
Second, there is a tendency to adopt a partisan perspective. Nationalists will try to understand what went wrong, Labourites why Joseph Muscat is so great. The challenge is to look at the result as just that.
One of the explanations doing the rounds is that Labour used its power of incumbency to buy (for want of a better word) votes. For example, there have been newspaper reports of stacks of jobs handed out in Gozo and elsewhere, right on the eve of the election. It also seems that some ministries were busy phoning people to ask if they needed anything. (Presumably they weren’t just asking.)
Now I’m sure that there was a lot of that going on, and I also think it an absolute disgrace that we seem to have jettisoned what was left of the notion of a caretaker government. We’ve also largely accepted the idea, among others, that governments may use public funds to produce and send out what are effectively campaign materials.
Still, no amount of handouts can explain a result of that kind. Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici’s outgoing government produced a jackpot of public sector jobs (up to 8000, by some estimates) in the last few months leading up to the 1987 election. Labour lost that election, simply because the freebies were no match for the hegemony that the PN had been building since 1977.
At most, the direct effects of the power of incumbency will have earned Labour several hundred votes. Certainly not a sufficient explanation for the 40,000-vote difference between it and the PN.
What about the supposed migration of swallows from the PL to the PN? Throughout its campaign, the PN made much of the fact that droves of people who voted Labour in 2013 had seen the error of their ways and were now ready to make amends.
Problem is, ‘fact’ comes from the Latin factum, which means ‘to make’. The story of the return of thousands of prodigal sons and daughters may have convinced many, but it was ultimately rhetorical and manufactured. I’m not saying that Simon Busuttil made it up – I think he and many others, me included, actually believed it was true. When he milked it for all it wasn’t worth, he wasn’t being deceitful.
The key attribute of the Labour hegemony is that it is one of feeling. To the majority of people, Labour feels right
One of the reasons why the story was digestible is that it had as its protagonists noticeable people like Michael Briguglio, Astrid Vella and one or two others. It was easy to see how very many might do the same. Trouble is, it would be a mistake to take the lives of saints as an indication of extensive saintliness among Catholics generally; all they tell us is that some Catholics are exceptional in their virtue.
A cursory look at voting patterns across districts shows that there were marginal gains for Labour in the first to the seventh and small ones for the PN in the eighth to the 12th districts. Gozo aside, there were no major swings in either direction. In other words, the result shows a consolidation of the vote along the lines of 2013.
Much as many Nationalists talk of missing ballot boxes, jobs for votes and the blinkered money-mindedness of the electorate, these and many other clues point towards one thing: a Labour Party hegemony.
Which also means that a sound understanding of what happened on June 3 must be based on the long duration. That’s because while switchers are of the here and now, hegemonies are of the order of decades.
2003 was the last time the PN managed an absolute majority (51.8 per cent) in an election. That number was linked to the prospect of EU membership, but it was also rooted in the PN’s own hegemony that went back to the first years of Fenech Adami and the 50.9 per cent absolute majority of 1981. (I consider 1996 a temporary reversal of fortunes.)
The PN has been losing ground ever since. In 2008, it managed 49.34 to Labour’s 48.79 per cent. All thoughts of an absolute majority had slipped away, and the difference was small enough for two decimal places to matter. By 2013, Labour enjoyed the support of 54.83 per cent of the population. That is now largely unchanged at 55.04 per cent, thus strengthening the argument for a hegemony.
Which raises two questions. First, what sort of a hegemony is it? It can’t be based on economic performance or the power of incumbency alone. Nor is it a matter of the gay vote and such sectorial interests. That’s because by the time Labour came to power in 2013, the hegemony was already firmly in place, in substance if not quite extent.
The key attribute of the Labour hegemony is that it is one of feeling. To the majority of people, Labour feels right. Nationalists should find this easy to understand, because much the same situation – but in reverse – obtained from the late 1980s to the early noughties. It matters that the Labour hegemony is one of feeling. It was one of the reasons why Joseph Muscat was ultimately the more believed on the Egrant matter, and also why the discourse of ‘normality’ peddled by the PN didn’t wash. When people feel right with a party, they tend to trust what its leaders say and feel pretty normal doing so.
The second question we need to answer is what led to the Labour hegemony in the first place. The easy part of the answer is that, in a democracy, hegemony can only ever be partial and temporary. No matter how strong and rooted a group may be, people will have the alternative very much in mind. In a democracy, every period of dominance contains the seeds of its own destruction. The Fenech Adami period was no exception.
The more difficult bit – and this is the sort of thinking the PN might wish to do right now – concerns the things that happened (or didn’t happen, in the case of divorce, for example) under the Nationalist governments of the mid-noughties. It appears that, having won the case for EU membership, the party lost the plot. The only reason why it didn’t lose much more, sooner, was Alfred Sant.
Muscat called a snap election to bury Egrant. The result shows he needn’t have bothered, because the switchers were nothing of the sort. It turns out the tenants were owners all along.
mafalzon@hotmail.com