Given the immense international assault on the country’s image in the wake of Daphne Caruana Galizia’s murder, it is understandable that the Prime Minister tries to calm things down. However, he is mistaken to think he can bring it all back to ‘business as usual’. That will never happen. The country has changed.
Joseph Muscat appears to want to reduce the murder to any other, something that just needs to be investigated by the police. He therefore defends his chief of police and says he is to be assessed according to his actions, rather than the “image being portrayed of him”.
He thinks that “lynching” the Police Commissioner would not lead to justice. He does not think that “democracy” is about booing, shouting or applauding. Of course, he does not. His rise to power was never dented with public protest or anger. He has had a generally smooth ride until last week when he left his office in Valletta and was booed.
The protestors on Sunday were not out to lynch the Police Commissioner or the Attorney General. They do not want a fall guy, they want things to change, radically. Dr Muscat must realise he carries the final political responsibility for the state the country is in.
The murder was the result of an accumulation of factors, foremost among which was Dr Muscat’s “cosmopolitan” vision for the country. It has become cosmopolitan indeed, for all the wrong reasons.
The Prime Minister set the ball rolling with his cash-for-passport scheme and it now emerges that it was those sales that turned the country’s deficit into a surplus. This economic bonanza from passports was described by the Church Commission on Justice and Peace as unsustainable with questionable ethics and morals. The passport sales, introduced early in the last legislature, set the mood for what came next. It began to feel we were on a pirate island.
Everything became justified if it brought money, like the sale of land in St George’s Bay at a questionable price, because it would ‘bring progress’. It does not. It just translates into a monstrosity on the horizon to be added to the one on the Sliema skyline very soon.
The delusion of a Dubai-style economy is based on building high-rise for high-net buyers. It is becoming an industry all to itself and it’s as unsustainable as selling passports.
Invariably, the good came with the bad and now, suddenly, the bad is beginning to shine through. The talk of oil, drug and people smuggling, of money laundering and of secret companies has been ongoing for some years. It would require a radical change in government policy, in the very government’s mindset, to reverse all this.
Ms Caruana Galizia’s murder brought all this to light. Someone, somewhere felt powerful enough to wipe her out and the government was powerless to stop it. The failure is political, the murder was political, the responsibility is political.
The Prime Minister ostensibly comes from a socialist party but there is no political ideology to what he does. His focus is wealth creation or, better, material delusion.
As Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI puts it: “Politics lives off a philosophy. Politics cannot simply be pragmatic, in the sense of ‘we’ll do something’. It must have a vision.”
The country needs a new vision. Now.