Today week, Antonio di Pietro is due to speak at a civil society demonstration. The significance of that is not that the Civil Society Network managed to recruit a star speaker in spite of its meagre resources. The significance is in the symbolic and historical meaning Di Pietro represents.
This will not ring bells for people born after 1980, and that, perhaps, is why history is tragically renowned for repeating itself.
Di Pietro started out as a policeman, eventually a judicial prosecutor in the Milan team that investigated, prosecuted and convicted the politicians that dominated his entire adult life. He was 40 at the time.
He chased everyone right up to a prime minister who escaped in exile to avoid the penalty that followed his conviction.
Di Pietro revealed a system of kickbacks paid by contractors to politicians to fund their lifestyles or their political campaigns. The fugitive prime minister, Bettino Craxi, admitted to accepting funds on behalf of his party, explaining that democracy could not function without parties but the Constitution did not provide for how they would be funded.
The Italian press called it tangentopoli, a city of kickbacks.
And Di Pietro called his campaign to destroy tangentopoli ‘Clean Hands’. That judicial campaign destroyed the political parties that had taken turns to govern Italy since the war. MPs voted in in April 1992, were in prison by May.
No coup or constitutional change was necessary. A team of courageous prosecutors used their existing powers to apply existing laws. They just chose to do their job.
And make no mistake. Our present Constitution empowers an Antonio di Pietro working today at police headquarters or at the Attorney General’s office in Valletta to bring down our own tangentopoli. And do not either make the mistake of thinking that a new Constitution manned by cowards would in any way have an impact on the sort of institutionalised corruption we are presently confronting.
CSN is delivering a message next Sunday: it will take more than institutional reform to address the endemic corruption of our democracy. We will need leaders of stamina, courage, complete altruism and self-sacrifice, competence and drive to fight incumbency, not to say defeat it.
But upon reflection, our job here is harder for deeper reasons than just because we’re not exactly overflowing with Di Pietros.
Something far more sinister than 1970s and 1980s Italy is going on here, and try as we might, we can’t quite put our finger on it.
Italian political parties and politicians in tangentopoli sought the favour of contractors in order to preserve their own power and influence. But the Italian republic, its public space, was firmly in control of that political class right up to their exile or imprisonment.
Here there is an increasingly disturbing feeling that our political class is no longer in control of our country. That public space in Malta has been passed to private interests. And unlike the contractors building roads or railways kicking back a margin to fund the Democrazia Cristiana or the Italian Socialist Party’s next campaign, these private interests are not smaller than the State they corrupt, but larger. Much larger.
The Labour Party, by some miracle, appears to have outgrown any dependence on funds. Its resources appear infinite
There is no doubt that an edifice of kickbacks exists in Malta: that political parties and politicians habitually accept campaign funding from people in business who at some point in the past, the present or a hoped-for future are paid public funds to provide goods or services to the public administration.
As in Italy, and elsewhere, up to ‘Clean Hands’, there appears to be an institutional unwillingness to stop this. There seems to be no better idea how the shortfall in funding political parties can be bridged, and this blemish on our democracy continues to be accepted as a necessary evil.
That is bad enough to start with. But it is a challenge within our own space and can be addressed should an Antonio di Pietro in our institutions apply our laws.
Things have been changing during the past few years.
The Labour Party, by some miracle, appears to have outgrown any dependence on funds. Its resources appear infinite in spite of the fact that its known revenue streams should have it just as impoverished and in a state of perpetual near-bankruptcy as the PN. There’s a goose laying golden eggs somewhere in its hidden recesses and it is hopelessly superficial to consider this as just a problem for the PN that cannot keep up with the crushing sheer overwhelming force of the Labour juggernaut.
The Nationalist Party is not merely financially insolvent. It has politically become like the Monty Python’s Black Knight, challenging Labour to a fight after all its limbs have been sawn off. It is naïve to see this as merely a happy phase for Labour and a problem of the PN’s own making.
There are simply too many coincidences to continue to accept that everything is what it seems and that politics in Malta is still a game played by rules set in the leaders’ offices of the two main parties. Whenever you try to explain the inexplicable you must look for the real beneficiaries of an unprecedented situation.
Sure, the Labour Party benefits from its apparently inexhaustible wealth and its Opposition’s neutering. But a closer look at the government suggests they are not entirely free to act as their power should allow them.
Consider, for example, how the Prime Minister in December 2013 had announced that only 1,800 passports would be sold to Individual Investor Programme buyers. During the election campaign earlier this year, on a take-out-the-trash-day, the government admitted it would sell beyond the quota. And a few days ago in Hong Kong the Prime Minister announced at one of the Henley and Partners events he is dragged to now on a monthly basis, a “second” phase of the citizenship-for-money scheme.
Consider, for another example, how the government has allowed itself to be embarrassed by the actions of Pilatus Bank. It watched in mortifying silence as the bank acquired a licence in such an unorthodox manner that criticism of that specific detail went all the way up to Strasbourg. It stood by as Pilatus owners bludgeoned and humiliated the local press into changing the historical record. It embarrassingly held back police action on the Pilatus offices while we watched bags containing who knows what taken out of the building and a plane flying out with no passenger manifest straight to Baku.
It would be perfunctory to assume that Joseph Muscat stood idly by out of callous indifference to any embarrassment these corporate insults were causing him. It is more likely that he could not do anything about it even if he wanted to.
As with the counter-intuitive Brexit vote, the institutional collapse in Kenya, the breakdown of the Opposition in Grenada and other micro-States, explanations of the political realities of Malta on the back of conventional voting behaviour analyses are becoming insufficient. Nothing is what it seems when the real decisions of the exercise of power are not taken in the offices of the institutions we elect but in secretive corporate boardrooms somewhere else.
It will take more than one Antonio di Pietro to get to the bottom of this. But like Di Pietro faced down his own insurmountable challenges, we have a duty not to give up.