Bye-bye Josie

Pandemonium at Labour HQ as the leader announces his resignation and everyone begins jockeying for position

Josie Muscat has resigned from the leadership of Azzjoni Nazzjonali. We don’t know yet whether the party will carry on without him, or whether it will simply cease to exist. It polled 1461 votes from all 13 districts, and not much can be done with that.

It has Alternattiva Demokratika’s experience to show that even if it beavers away for many years, it isn’t likely to increase much over that showing. And anyway, what’s the point? Both Muscat and Anglu Xuereb have businesses to take care of. They can put AN down in their memory book as an interesting experience and move on – though I must say that electoral life will be much less colourful without them and, in particular, Muscat’s multi-hued tops and creative use of vulgar idiom.

If only it were bye-bye Harry

Harry Vassallo has also promised to resign from his party’s leadership, but he’s trying to pull an Alfred-Sant-in-2003. He says he will submit his resignation at Alternattiva Demokratika’s next meeting, which is in April. But he also says that he will stay on if the party asks him to do so, though he would prefer to be a ‘foot-soldier’.

Oh, I don’t know about this. He should have done what Sant did today – say ‘I resign, it’s irrevocable, and I’m off.’ It will be hard for Vassallo to find a role and an identity for himself after 16 years as leader of a political party (which never had a seat in parliament during that entire period), but if Sant can find a way at a few years older, then so can he. This kind of thing comes with the territory.

Vassallo is not fit to lead the party in any case. We had that scandal just before the election, when we found out that his fines had been converted to a prison sentence and that he had applied for a presidential pardon and yet still refused to fill in 37 VAT returns. I imagine that lots of his supporters and perhaps even his activists were surprised by this revelation. That was a resignation matter, and still he stayed on, facing election as party leader with the guillotine of a prison sentence hanging over him.

For the past few months, he has been coming across as increasingly delusional (‘we will win four seats in this election’) and these aspects of his personality became even more pronounced during the tense electoral campaign, with his repeated reference to the democratically elected government as a dictatorship, and to himself and his fellow party activists as persecuted dissidents.

It all became extremely tiresome, but then yesterday he gave The Malta Independent some quotes that made him sound very much like our friend the Clucking Chicken. (I had already noted the similarity between various qualities of these two party leaders.) ‘The new government does not have political legitimacy, as neither of the two parties got an absolute majority (of votes),” he said. ‘It is clear that the population does not want to be ruled by either of these parties.’

On the contrary – what is clear is that the population wants only to be ‘ruled’ by these two parties, and not by AD. Around 90% of eligible voters opted for either one or the other. That’s pretty much the population, if you ask me. Meanwhile, AD polled 3810 votes, which is 1.31% of the total votes cast – a mere 0.1% higher than in the general election of 1998. The much-touted Carmel Cacopardo put up a miserable showing, Vassallo was eliminated in the 13th count, and Arnold Cassola will be eliminated too.

AD had extremely high hopes this time, which led to all this talk about coalitions. Unfortunately, the party’s sense of self-importance became increasingly inflated. Talk about securing one seat somehow morphed into talk about being in government, through forming a coalition with one of the larger parties. But neither of the larger parties wanted or needed AD, especially because they don’t need more than 50% of the vote to form a government, but only a relative majority. AD’s supporters scoffed when it was pointed out that their promises to voters were just so much pie-in-the-sky, but now it’s all come out in the wash.

Now Vassallo has a fresh hobby-horse. Instead of coalition government, it’s electoral reform. The electoral legislation, he is insisting, must be reformed because although AD ‘won the equivalent of a quota’, it doesn’t have a seat in parliament. Well, excuse me, Harry, but AD didn’t win the equivalent of a quota. Quotas are on districts, and not on the entire two islands taken as a whole. If we were to take that approach, where would we end up?

There was more rancorous posturing from Vassallo in The Malta Independent. ‘Both parties received under 50% (of the vote) and the result will only be clear when the last AD candidate is elected or rejected, and not at the end of the first count,’ he said. ‘This could have been avoided if the parties had decided to form an alliance with AD before the election. We could have had a clearer result much earlier in the day.’

Let me get this straight. Vassallo is saying that either the Labour Party or the Nationalist Party should have formed a coalition alliance with AD, purely so that we could have had the election result announced after the first count. What? Vassallo clearly needs some rest and relaxation.

And when he goes on holiday, he should take the party PRO, Ralph Cassar, with him. Cassar told the same newspaper: ‘The people have cut the parties down to size. The Opposition will have more votes than the government party, which means that we will have a minority government.’ Again, what on earth? As far as I can decipher the meaning of Cassar’s words, what he is saying here is that, taken together, the votes of the people who chose the Labour Party, AN, AD, Imperium Europa and Forza Malta are greater in number that the votes of the people who chose the Nationalist Party.

Aside from the fact that this is the kind of reasoning that led Alfred Sant to claim that partnership had won the referendum, as a (pretend) politician Cassar should know that the Opposition is made up of the largest single party in parliament, other than the one that forms the government. It is not made up of all the parties who are in parliament but not in government, and it is especially not made up of those parties who received votes that did not translate into a parliamentary seat.

A minority government, indeed – when will these AD people give it a rest?

A kind couple takes pity on the ex-Labour leader and welcomes him into their lovely home.

Labour raises funds to make up the electoral budget deficit by selling catchy slogan T-shirts.

Alfred Sant is feeling a little exposed after his electoral hammering.

Il-Partit Laburista isejjah konferenza generali biex jaghzel mexxej gdid ghall-bidu gdid iehor.

Jason Micallef sits on the fence.

Labour spin-doctors wish they’d known about this way to silence Sant before the electoral campaign began.