[attach id=593522 size="medium"]Photo: Matthew Mirabelli[/attach]
Frank Portelli, a leadership candidate in the Nationalist Party race, says the party needs a patriot as leader. But why should it turn to Portelli, whose patriotism diverges completely from the PN’s, going all the way back to its first 19th-century leader, Fortunato Mizzi?
This week, the party effectively censured Portelli for xenophobic and homophobic speech, saying it goes against the party’s fundamental principles and the statute itself. Stern as it is, however, the party’s public statement actually glided over the ‘malice’ in Portelli’s actions.
(Let’s not forget that, in politics, speech – which can incite some or give cover to the actions of others – is action, not ‘mere words’.)
Portelli says he doesn’t believe in multiculturalism. Fine. The word has as many meanings, some incompatible, as ‘socialism’ did in the 19th century. As we can see with Germany’s Angela Merkel, it’s perfectly possible to be for it and against it at the same time.
But Portelli is using the term as cover for something more sinister. He implied that he would kick out 80 per cent of the immigrants in Malta.
That would break international law and ride roughshod over humanitarian concerns (and, possibly, seriously damage Malta’s labour market).
It’s not the first time that Portelli is voicing this sentiment. In 2009, as an MEP candidate for the PN, he said similar things when Malta and Italy were facing major waves of migrants coming over by boat from Africa.
He wasn’t censured publicly then. But the only voice more extreme than his at the time was Joseph Muscat’s. As Opposition leader, in an MEP campaign in which migration was a hot issue, Muscat was urging Malta to use the veto in the European Council and dropping broad hints that he, as prime minister, would be prepared to authorise pushbacks.
When Portelli says that the PN needs a patriot for a leader, he should go on to tell us which PN leader was the kind of patriot he has in mind.
Portelli is clearly criticising Simon Busuttil and the humanitarian policy followed by Lawrence Gonzi as prime minister. In 2009, however, the strongest voice against going along with the then Italian policy – of intercepting migrants at sea and pushing them back – was Eddie Fenech Adami’s.
So, that’s all three living PN leaders who aren’t patriots by Portelli’s standards. What standards are these?
We get a better idea from a Facebook post, where Portelli tried to channel his inner La Rochefoucauld. He informs us that a gay man can marry a woman, have children, then leave her to marry a man. He has taken down the post since. But, for a while, he let that Olympian observation hang.
He also let hang – without immediate deletion and complete dissociation – a reader’s comment, which alluded approvingly to the Nazi treatment of homosexuals as subhuman. Portelli can say, till he’s blue in the face, that he wasn’t condoning but simply ‘listening’, as Great Leaders do, and registering the sentiments ‘out there’.
However, what he was doing was giving such sentiments a platform.
These are the sentiments and the tactics of the Far Right. Their patriotism isn’t content with love. It must find some people to despise.
But with far-right politicians, it’s worse. They do not just despise. They use their targets as bait for career purposes.
African immigration isn’t even an issue at the moment. No boats. No jobs being taken from native Maltese. If it’s not a current issue, why talk about it so conspicuously? Elsewhere, it would be called race-baiting.
Neither the living nor the dead former PN leaders share Frank Portelli’s patriotism
Whatever the patriotism of the PN has been throughout its 140-year history, it hasn’t ever been this.
Its motto of Religio et Patria is often misread. Seventy years before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (itself a diluted form of Christian belief in human dignity), Catholicism stood for a universalistic form of international solidarity at a time when European nationalism was war-mongering.
Even the language of worship, Latin, was international. The belief in the fundamental equality before God set limits to the arbitrariness of monarchs and emperors.
Religio qualified the nationalism of Patria (while Patria qualified the authority of clerics). Political historians, like Joseph Pirotta and Henry Frendo, and linguistic historians, like Joseph M. Brincat, have shown how the early emphasis by PN leaders on the closeness of Malta’s relationship to Italy had to do with cultural kinship.
Theirs was an outward-looking, internationalist patriotism. The emphasis on ‘Italy’ (when that State was a rather looser entity than it is today and when ‘Italianness’ meant analagous to ‘Hellenic’) was there to protect against ‘Little Malta’ inward-looking patriotism.
That sentiment was officially articulated in 1925. Italy now under Mussolini, the PN reiterated explicitly that in talking about ‘Italianness’ (or the ‘Italic’ character of Malta), it had culture in mind.
Enrico Mizzi, who could use pungent language in private, is known to have said that one always loves one’s mother, even if she is a prostitute (he used a stronger word, in Italian, of course), leaving his listeners in no doubt about what he thought of fascist Italy.
We might miss the nuances now but the words of the PN anthem, penned by Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici in the mid-1930s, were loaded, at the time, to indicate clearly the internationalist rather than the ultra-nationalist sentiments.
Anyone still in doubt about the PN anthem and its emblem, designed by Vincenzo Bonello – about whether they have any kinship with Portelli’s brand of far-right nationalism – should answer the following question:
Is it a coincidence that, between them, Mifsud Bonnici and Bonello fathered three men – Giuseppe and Ugo Mifsud Bonnici, and Giovanni Bonello – who have all shown a profound intellectual and practical interest in the protection of fundamental rights? And who have all combined this interest in internationalist human dignity with a filial devotion to their respective fathers’ memory and cultural legacy?
Oh, and did I mention that Ugo Mifsud, one of the PN co-leaders in the 1930s, was a distinguished international lawyer (as demonstrated by the research of one of his prominent successors in the field, David Attard)?
So, no, neither the living nor thedead former PN leaders share Portelli’s patriotism.
Why devote so much space to someone who isn’t a serious candidate for the leadership? Portelli is in his mid-70s today. The electorate will not vote in a near-octogenarian as prime minister. Nor will the broad electorate of the PN vote for a leader with far-right sentiments.
Because the real danger is another. That, in a spirit of misguided inclusivity, the new PN leader in September will seek to ‘include’ all three of his former rivals into the party. And that Portelli will claim to be a spokesman – on the basis of his votes – of some ‘stream’ of the PN.
Such ‘inclusivity’ would be madness. You cannot include someone who rejects the party’s core values.
What will happen is that factionalism will be given official recognition and the core values weakened.
A PN with Portelli having an official capacity, however minor, would deserve the contempt of all those who love Malta for its enshrined humane, constitutional values.
ranierfsadni@europe.com