Bidu Gdid

I can’t believe it: after 10 years and a hammering in three general elections and one referendum, he’s finally realised that his position is untenable. And here we are – a brand new Bidu Gdid without him. It must be painful for the Labour Party, but they’re going to be glad this happened in the long run. It should have happened in 1998, though I’m glad it didn’t because we probably wouldn’t have been in the Eurozone or even in the European Union. So we have Dom Mintoff to thank for joining the EU and Sant to thank for joining the Eurozone, and now, finally, he’s water under the bridge and left for the historians to judge.

If the Nationalist Party is going down in Maltese political history as the first to win three consecutive general elections with a majority of votes, then the flipside is that the Labour Party is also going down in history as the first political party to lose three consecutive general elections. And Alfred Sant will go down in history as the man who was at the helm when it happened – three times.

There was a collective shout of relief last Sunday night. If you read between the lines, it wasn’t only ‘thank God Gonzi is going to be prime minister’, but also ‘thank God I don’t have to wake up tomorrow with Sant as prime minister.’ The Labour Party seriously underestimated how disliked and mistrusted he was as a potential prime minister, even by people who have voted Labour all their lives. The Nationalist Party haemorrhaged votes for a number of reasons, but those votes didn’t migrate to Labour. They just stayed home or spoiled their ballot-paper. They should have been rushing to Labour, but they didn’t. They should have rushed to AD, but they didn’t – only in part because they read the situation correctly that a vote for AD would increase the party’s likelihood of getting a seat and disrupting the constitutional seat-adjustment mechanism, putting Sant in government. That’s how much people didn’t want Alfred Sant as prime minister.

Fear of having Sant as prime minister – which is not the same as fear of Sant the man, lest those who like sticking up for him rush forward to protest – is also what brought out the malingerers and the ditherers, and the ones who thought they were indifferent but then realised that they weren’t. By Saturday 9 March you could feel the tension in the country: ‘Allahares jitla Alfred Sant.’ Was it because of scaremongering, as that Evarist Bartolo suggested when he made a surprise appearance late in the campaign on BondiPlus? No – the Nationalist Party did remind electors what life with Sant as prime minister was like, but those electors had direct experience of him and knew it themselves. Sure, they may have been sick to the back teeth of the Nationalists, but as the spectre of Sant loomed larger and larger, the status quo began to seem increasingly more attractive (which it certainly is). And Alfred Sant was almost single-handedly responsible for frightening away the vast majority of first-time voters, who were conspicuous by their presence at Nationalist mass meetings and conspicuous by their absence at Labour gatherings. When the numbers are crunched, I think it will become clear that this election was won for the Nationalists by the zaghzagh who seem to have built a relationship with Lawrence Gonzi, a relationship which appears to be mutual.

AD, with its voice and media coverage which are completely disproportionate to its size, colonised virtually every print medium to explain to us that it really doesn’t make a difference who becomes prime minister. This is where the tin-can political party’s credibility took a self-inflicted bashing. You can’t address intelligent people and tell them that pretty much either man will do. Even if you are a headless chicken you are bound to have an opinion either way. You might prefer Sant. That’s still an opinion. AD’s stance went down least well with its target market: people like me. As soon as I began hearing all that tosh about how it doesn’t make a difference who runs the country, the tin-can party hit a brick wall where I was concerned. It may not make a blind bit of difference to AD, but it makes a difference to me and to all right-thinking people. It didn’t help, of course, that AD’s motives in saying this were transparent. They knew that to get people to vote for them, they would have to persuade them that it didn’t matter if the constitutional mechanism didn’t come into play and Sant became prime minister with a majority of seats and a minority of votes.

They even had the ruddy nerve to tell those of us who predicted this would happen that we were scaremongering and lying. Scaremongering and lying? Well, it as good as happened, didn’t it? Now that we have had that live demonstration of how we almost got Sant as prime minister with fewer votes than the Nationalist Party, thanks to AD putting its interests before all else, I hope its activists cease to feed giant fibs to the gullible of Sliema and Swieqi. The only one of them to come out of this mess with the slightest bit of honour is Rene Rossignaud, the AD Swieqi councillor who resigned because he could see what was coming and didn’t want to be part of it.

AD’s principles are all over the shop. The party campaigns for rent reform while its leader tries to wrest a piece of property off his landlord for a peanuts price as a protected tenant. It scuttles about crying shame on others while its leader has a criminal conviction for which he demanded a presidential pardon – and then refused to fill in the 37 VAT returns on which the pardon was conditional. It calls itself the green party and yet had so little to say about the environment in its electoral manifesto that it was actually outdone by Labour and its computer malfunctions and misprints. At some point in the last year or two, the straightforward desire for a seat in parliament morphed into the obsession with actually being in government, as of by right, on the strength of this single and non-existent seat. The superciliousness with which AD approached this matter is, with hindsight, so infuriatingly arrogant that they should be put in the stocks of public opinion and pelted hard with rotten tomatoes. How dare anyone demand to be in government on the basis of a single seat backed by a couple of thousand electors?

AD has been around for 20 years, and in all this time, the only seat it managed to score was by default, when Wenzu Mintoff left the Labour Party while an MP, and joined AD instead. AD had a seat in parliament for three years, and no one noticed.

Now it’s time for AD to get the message. The market doesn’t want it. I may have mocked Josie Muscat for his vulgar language and his racist, misogynist attitude – but I have to hand it to the man, he understands that the rules of the market also apply to politics. If people don’t want your product, don’t keep trying to force it on them and cursing them for not buying it. Just shut up shop and move on to something different instead. With his quick resignation and his statement that he’s done with politics for the rest of his life, Dr Muscat demonstrated the ‘don’t throw good money after bad’ thinking that has no doubt made his healthcare business the huge success that it is. It is just a shame that he didn’t think this way before he returned to the political fray, when it was clear to most that the market didn’t want this particular product either.

The much-touted Carmel Cacopardo failed miserably at the polls. Did he imagine that he would score a couple of thousand number-ones just because the AD coterie thinks of him as a whistle-blowing hero? That was a nice misinterpretation of the meaning of whistle-blowing.

It struck me how completely irrelevant AD have become when I saw their three front-runners edging their way into the university auditorium for that famous debate: Arnold in an anorak and jumper looking like he was going fishing, Cacopardo in his batty-professor jacket looking like he was going to mark examination papers for some frightened students, and Harry looking like a 1930s spiv. Even to me they looked over the hill and past it, which isn’t surprising, given that they’re 10 to 12 years older even than I am. How could any 18-year-old student relate to them at all? The green party is meant to be young and dynamic, a magnet mainly to people in their 20s. It is not meant to be grudge-vote dustbin mainly for middle-aged and elderly people with some NIMBY problem or general resentment and bitterness. The attractive, charismatic and well-spoken Mario Mallia should have been leader, but it’s way too late for that now. It looks like the Nationalist Party is the only one with the ability to take seeming nonentities, wave a magic wand, and turn them into electoral heroes whom people look up to, admire and respect.

While writing this, I still don’t know who will be in the new cabinet. I have my hopes, but can’t make any predictions. It would be stupid to do so anyway, given that the names will have been announced by the time this column appears in print.

The prime minister has repeatedly said he is going to heed the electorate’s desire for new, young faces in government. My own analysis of the pre-electoral situation was that when people whined about wanting change, what they really wanted was a new line-up ministers and not the Nationalist Party thrown out of government and Sant brought back instead. Let’s put it this way: some men have been cabinet ministers for four terms of government – 20 years. However good they have been in handling their portfolios, this is no justification for giving them another ministerial position if there are other, newer names who are able to do the job well instead.

It does put the prime minister in the dreadfully embarrassing position of telling somebody who has served him long and well: “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing for you this time. I have to put the interests of the party and the government first.” In private corporations and businesses, this sort of thing happens all the time, because the interests of the business are put first. But in a political party it’s different. MPs who pull in lots of votes also have lots of clout. This time, though, it seems that the electorate did a bit of sorting out themselves, choosing carefully from the list of what was on offer, and showing a marked preference for new faces over old. My own belief is that, no matter how good the performance of somebody who has been a minister for all or much of the last 20 years, it should come from him to bow out gracefully at this point and say: ‘The time has come for me to make way for others.’ This is the gentlemanly thing to do, because it spares the prime minister more embarrassment and awkwardness and it also puts the interests of the party (and the country) one serves before one’s own. If only more people thought this way.

This newspaper column is published today in The Malta Independent.