Oh jingle bells! He’s back.
Mister Power of Incumbency is back to entertain us, sporting his trademark poker-face and deploying his humour-busting verbal missiles in L-orizzont.
This time he’s decided to tell us, in densely-knitted prose over two pages, why the people who wrote Labour’s Why We Lost report were wrong and why he – of course – was right. He brought up the power of incumbency, Air Malta’s cheap flights for voters, ‘illegal favours’, extravagance with public funds, ‘illegally obtained information about private citizens’ and – oh yes – contracts. He used to tell us that contracts and favours were handed out to tal-qalba, friends of friends, and il-barunijiet. Now he’s telling us that they’re being used in a form of elaborate gift exchange with the votes of those who wouldn’t have voted Nationalist otherwise. Make up your mind, sir.
Where have we heard all this before? It was at his resignation press conference just after his fourth consecutive hammering at the polls (three general elections and one referendum). You know, the one at which he didn’t really resign, the one to which reporters turned up in force expecting to hear his valedictory only to find out that they’d been summoned to hear how right he was and how wrong the rest of us were. Let’s put it this way: John McCain he ain’t. Grace and dignity he can do without.
We heard much the same thing, too, in that infamous interview in The Sunday Times just before the country went to the polls – yes, that’s right, No Regrets. He had no regrets about any decision he’d taken in the past, no regrets about the mess he’d made with the European Union and Switzerland in the Mediterranean and Partnership. Frankly, my dear, he didn’t give a damn. But unlike Rhett Butler, he couldn’t quite carry it off, and made people so mad at his pig-headed refusal to adjust, budge or admit error that they hissed him all the way to another defeat.
I’m not a big fan of Joseph Muscat. You all know what I think of him by now. But you have to admire the man’s restraint in not telling this serial loser where to get off the bus instead of shouting instructions from the back-seat. Or maybe it’s just that Sant’s former poodle owes him so many favours that he feels obliged to pad his response in cotton-wool. “The country is facing new challenges and can’t waste time looking back at past mistakes and failed solutions,” he said. The rest of that sentence was left hanging in mid-air, unsaid: ….”or listening to failed leaders.” And by the way, Mr Opposition Leader, sir, it’s not the country that’s exercised by the internal wrangling of the Labour Party, but the Labour Party itself. The country has other things to be getting on with.
Who takes advice from those who couldn’t run their own show when they had the chance? If Alfred Sant was such a great leader, if he knew the answers and had all the solutions, he wouldn’t have spent 22 months as prime minister and 14 years in opposition. He wouldn’t have lost three elections on the trot and one referendum for good measure. And he wouldn’t have claimed, after each of those losses – I have to remind you about this, because I’d forgotten it myself until now – that the other party’s win against him was illegitimate, and that it would all come to grief, you’ll see. After one of those defeats – let’s see, which one was it now, 1998? – he actually wrote to all the big bosses in the European Union that he didn’t want to join, telling them why the new government was illegitimate.
And here we are, a whole decade later, still listening to him rewind those old gripes, again and again and again. So this government is illegitimate too, is it? What, do you mean like the one that got in when you messed up so royally 10 years ago? My, my – now that’s what I call a coincidence. It’s funny that it should have happened to the same man, at the hands of two different opponents. I’ll put on my tin-foil hat and see if there’s any conspiracy here, possibly involving the CIA, the FBI, MI5, the Bader Meinhof and Giulio Andreotti. And maybe the Mafia was involved? I’m sure that if Sant were to give Anglu Farrugia a ring he’d have some interesting theories. Now there’s a man with a whole wardrobe of tin-foil hats. And then Joseph Muscat can write a book about it in his spare time. He is hoping for a boring year, after all, or at least, that’s what he told The Sunday Times when it asked him for his hopes for 2009.
Sant says that he’s speaking now, when the dust has settled over at the Labour Party (you tell me; maybe Anglu’s famous elephant stampeded) because he didn’t want to be seen as interfering by giving his views earlier on. Is the man spending too much time in the company of his poultry – something which I admit to understanding, given that I find animals so much easier to get along with than people? Whenever, however and wherever he speaks about party matters, it’s going to be construed as interference, for the simple reason that this is exactly what it is. Maybe he doesn’t remember what happened when he was prime minister and Mintoff gave him advice in the summer of 1998. If so, there are a few videos on YouTube which record the event. Former party leaders should fade quietly into the night and, like former spouses, maintain a dignified silence at all times. The trouble with Alfred Sant is that he is psychologically incapable of admitting defeat or coming to terms with the fact that he was wrong.
Look at him now: after all these years and all these changes, he’s still insisting that he was right about the wrongness of EU membership for Malta. “Time is proving correct Labour’s views about the effect of EU membership on families and businesses,” he wrote in L-orizzont. Labour’s views? They were his views, and he imposed them on the rest. Look how readily they’ve all come running to embrace the EU and, more to the point, what the EU can do for them.
Imagine that: despite all the changes for the better, despite the very culture-change that has opened up the world for Maltese people from all social backgrounds and of all ages except the most elderly, he’s still saying that we should have stayed confined to this couple of rocks, mentally, physically and in terms of business. “It is only the elite who are benefitting from membership,” he said. Come off it, Dr Sant. It’s true that among the first to leap on the gravy-train of public office in Brussels were a gaggle of Super One journalists, one of whom is now gagging to become prime minister, but that doesn’t mean they’re the elite, nor does it mean that ordinary people from anonymous backgrounds are not hoovering up the opportunities.
Just as he has held on to his opinions and not veered from them even in the face of mounting evidence that he was wrong, so Alfred Sant demonstrates, with his most recent foray into the public arena, that he has lost none of his losing streak. His advice to Joseph Muscat is to ignore what’s said and written by those who “always want to weaken the left and Labour, like The Sunday Times and others of that sort.”
Even leaving aside the fact that Labour has long since veered to the right of the political spectrum, you would imagine that somebody who has spent the last 35 years waving his marketing and business administration degrees around, heavily disguised as ‘ekonomija’, would be familiar with the essential wisdom of setting a thief to catch a thief. In other words, if the Labour Party wants to understand the thinking and attitudes of those whose votes it needs for a resounding victory at the polls, then it should make keen interpretation of what’s said and published by ‘The Sunday Times and others of that sort’ mandatory for all of its politicians.
Sant’s advice to Muscat shouldn’t be to blockheadedly ignore what The Sunday Times leader-writers and columnists like me are writing (the man can’t bring himself to mention me by name; it sticks in his throat), for the simple reason that we echo the thoughts of others. We are not odd-balls operating in a vacuum. Sant’s policy of ignoring those he doesn’t like, of pretending that we don’t exist, of refusing to answer questions at press conferences and glaring at or looking through ‘enemy’ journalists, of not properly listening to what was being said or reading what was written, served him ill. It took his finger right off the pulse. Joseph Muscat would be making a serious mistake if he were to go down the same path. But I think he knows that. I think he’s realised at last – probably with that useful hindsight that allows him to see now, almost six years later, that maybe the Yes lobby won the referendum – that his old boss and poodle-master has been the problem all along. And forget the power of incumbency.
This article is published in The Malta Independent today.
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Hey Daph, what happened to Maltastar, is it still ‘under construction”?
[Daphne – Apparently so.]
This is not quite the earthquake that Joseph had promised, is it? In any case, it still has the makings of a disaster for Labour!
@Daphne
You are so right, down to a T. As I always say, it is tragic that we have been lumbered with such a useless, pathetic lot as these guys. Imagine if we had a serious opposition with a bit (yes even a bit) more brains and a modicum of style, and who would provide a credible alternative government, how much better off for it we’d be…………..
Clearly, some people miss Sant dearly.
Is Muscat Sant’s poodle?
[Daphne – Not any more, it seems; he doesn’t need him any longer.]
Daphs, I read this somewhere…can’t remember who wrote it though “You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.”
‘failed solutions’… sounds like a typical oxymoron to me. May be ‘outdated solutions’ or ‘anachronistic’ but if they were solutions they could not have failed. The problem, or rather issue, is that they were no solutions by any stretch of imagination.
[Daphne – Thanks for bringing that up. Damn! I missed it.]
The MLP lost the elections due to the “power of incumbency” all right – the incumbency of Alfred Sant as their leader.
Have you heard about PL meaning Pass Lura?
Notwithstanding all the bitter comments and venom directed against Alfred Sant he is constantly being proved right. And it was the power of incumbency which won the Nats the elections after all.
[Daphne – You’re right there, Gerald – his power of incumbency. He scared people away. In what has he been proved right? Devaluation? The eurozone? EU membership? VAT? CET? Partnership? I’m just wondering. And in case you need a brief lesson in very obvious psychology, he’s the one who’s overcome by bitterness and who can’t let go.]
For a better understanding of Alfred Sant’s first rate intelligence and capabilities it would be instructive to read Oliver Friggieri’s titanic autobiography, ‘Fjuri li ma Jinxfux’ who truly sums up Sant’s qualities. And this comes from a first rate intellectual who is very much perceived as being on the Nationalist side of things.
[Daphne – Nobody questioned his intellectual prowess, Gerald. We questioned his ability to run the country and to take decisions on our behalf. Alfred Sant was, is and will forever be no more suited to the role of prime minister than Oliver Friggieri. You are correct in equating the two.]
I don’t agree Daphne. Alfred Sant was a sick man who ran a splendid campaign in the face of adversity and a very strong spin machine. And you have to admit that jobs, favours and the PM on the phone till the late hours of election day did get the PN the few thousand votes it needed in the end. And does he not have a right to be bitter after having been character assassinated for 16 years by dirty, personal, scaremongering campaigns? With all his faults and bad decisions, he almost squeaked it through after all with absolutely no help from Labour’s hopeless political organization. Oh and by the way, wasn’t it the PN who devaluated the currency way back in the early 90’s? I know as I was in banking at that time.
Perhaps he wasn’t capable of running the country but that does not diminish my great respect for him. After all to quote Richard Nixon when addressing a close friend -the ultimate political nemesis – ‘You’re not good for politics Len . You just don’t know how to lie’.
Gerald,
So, applying Nixon’s quote to the present Labour leader, do you think Joseph Muscat is good for politics?
Regarding Alfred Sant, it’s true that his ill-health unfortunately probably played a part in the errors of the last electoral campaign but 2008 was not the only election he lost. What about 1998, 2003 and the referendum? If the Labour organisation was hopeless, that’s also largely his responsability too. As a political figure Alfred Sant should be judged on his entire career not just his last few months as Labour leader.
@ Gerald – After 20 years in opposition, one would have expected Labour to win by a landslide. And no griping about the prime minister being on the phone till late on election day – what’s wrong with that?
Please explain why some 6,000 known Labour supporters decided to abstain – surely not because of Jason Micallef? The reason was Alfred Sant. Finally, were it not for the JPO debacle, every indication until 10 days before election date showed the PN leading by 4,000 – 5,000 votes. Perhaps you are unaware that in the run up to the 1987 election, 5,550 jobs with the public sector (no error there) were granted. For your info those jobs over a period of 20 years cost the exchequer half the national debt.
[Daphne – I disagree completely with the interpretation of the effect Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando had on people’s voting intentions in the last few days of the election. Commonsense should tell those who interpreted the result this way that, if people didn’t vote PN because of him, then he wouldn’t have been elected on the first count in two districts, and with votes to spare.]
I’ve yet to see a sign of Sant’s vaunted “intellectual prowess”, and I don’t mean in the political field. Plenty of people hold doctorates, and can speak both French and German, and yet we don’t go on about their first-rate intelligence. Whenever a leader is surrounded by fawning sycophants, he’s apt to screw up majestically.
[Daphne – Nor is it entirely a coincidence that, like his successor, his mother raised him to think the sun shines out of the seat of his pants. Mothers of sons….boy, can they screw up. I’ve just read that Charles Ponzi, the Italian (Sicilian?) who operated the first-ever pyramid scheme scam in the 1920s, as an immigrant to North America, did it all to impress his mama back home.]
Someone here is coming across as being infatuated with Sant. Not too healthy for a man in his 30s.
Daphne – the hard core PN supporters voted for JPO to back him up because of Sant’ s attack. But it appears that the PN majority dwindled rapidly in the last few days- floating voters are very fickle. ( opinion polls evidence this out).
[Daphne – I have had a zillion arguments about this one, David. It’s not possible. People who live in Pullicino Orlando’s constituencies are not a different species which thinks differently. They are a representative sample of the population, and those who vote Nationalist in those constituencies are a representative sample of people who vote Nationalist anywhere else on the island. Hence, the rationale behind their support for Pullicino Orlando should be taken as representative of the general thinking among those who favoured the Nationalist Party in other constituencies. It clearly makes no sense to say that everyone who was a ‘hard-core PN supporter’ happened to be living in those two constituencies, while everyone who disapproved of Pullicino Orlando lived in other constituencies and didn’t vote, or switched capriciously from PN to Labour just because of that, at the 11th hour. If electors in Pullicino Orlando’s constituencies reacted to Sant’s bullying behaviour by backing him with their vote, then you can rest assured that tens of thousands of people in other constituencies would have done the same if they could. People who live in Mosta and wherever are not a race apart. They think the way everyone else does.]
daphne – beg to differ . The way people voted in those 2 districts is indeed representative of what happened nationally. If Malta was just one district , JPO would have probably polled most votes only second to Gonzi, because the hard core Nationalists never for a moment doubted the cute environmentalist. In parallel you have the floating voters, who are more discerning, and in the last days of the campaign you had the issue whether healthcare will remain free and the JPO bombshell. The facts are, that votes were lost nationally which include JPO’s districts. The timing by the MLP was so wrong. Had they published the contract 2 weeks earlier, rest assured JPO would still have been elected (by the hard core vote), but the election may well have been lost.
[Daphne – I really don’t think so. I know what the polls said, I know the numbers, but unlike some, I don’t hypothesise. It could have been any number of things, and perhaps even no particular thing at all. Labour lost thousands of votes in the last few weeks of the campaign. It lost them on a daily basis. Was there a single reason? No. You can only suppose that it was this or that, and take an educated guess. Unfortunately, the analysis that linked the slight fall-off of support for the PN in the last few days to the Pullicino Orlando case was made on the back of huge (and justified) anger at his failure to disclose all information immediately to those who mattered, and I don’t just mean his electors. When you’re that enraged, you need to whack the person. And that’s why all analysis should be carried out with a cool, clear and dispassionate head, rather than an angry one. I wasn’t angry at the situation, but totally detached: I actually believe he pulled in the votes of people who wouldn’t have voted otherwise. I was equally dispassionate in the aftermath, which is why, when those who mattered, and Joe and Mary Average, were screaming for his resignation and putting pressure on him to go, I argued that it made more sense in the long run not to upset the apple-cart.After all, the seat is his and not the party’s; his constituents voted him in to represent them, and if he was going to be made to resign from anything at all, it could only be from the party, by having the whip withdrawn, leading to the collapse of the government which would then be deprived of its one-seat majority. Also, when you exclude and publicly humiliate somebody by pushing them outside the group, you turn them into the equivalent of a rogue elephant (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/rogue+elephant), which is never a good idea. My stance was that things would calm down and blow over if he stayed where he was, but forcing him out would create problems, and those problems wouldn’t necessarily be created by Pullicino Orlando. The next in line to fill his seat, had he resigned, was probably Toni Abela, who drives a large cream Mercedes with a number-plate IN-NUTAR. How would that have been better? And make no mistake, much of the agitation for Pullicino Orlando’s resignation may have come from those with an agenda for their own furtherance.]
@Daphne
Ma nafx imma I think JPO did let the side down, big time, whatever voters thought at THAT moment in time.
[Daphne – David and I are not debating whether he let the side down. That is a given. We are debating whether he caused the loss of votes. David thinks so. I don’t. I actually think he galvanised the vote, and the evidence is in the way he brought out the vote in his constituencies. If people felt that way in his constituencies, they will have felt exactly the same in other constituencies, but without the ability to vote for him. He has no track record of such strong support. The support was directly linked to his perceived persecution. A lot of people would have ticked his box as one in the eye for Sant.]
In my view JPO galvanised the vote of the staunch Nationalist supporter , by voting for him rather than his colleagues. The undeniable facts are 1) in the last days the PN campaign was completely derailed , and for the first time in the campaign PN was on the defensive, with Labour setting the agenda in the final debates. 2) The PN was slipping in the polls ( This is a fact) .Surely one cannot reason that the vote was slipping because the floating voter was switching sides because of other issues, while JPO helped the PN win some back !
I agree with you the party could not just throw out JPO. It would have led to a similar situation of Sant mishandling the Mintoff problem
David S. – “Please explain why some 6,000 known Labour supporters decided to abstain – surely not because of Jason Micallef? The reason was Alfred Sant.”
According to Labour’s post-election analysis of the vote between 7,000 and 10,000 supporters abstained because of Labour’s complete U-turn with regards to the EU. These are not all hard-core anti-EU diehards. While some admittedly expected Labour to fight for withdrawal from the EU, the vast majority respect the referendum result but were highly annoyed by the party’s sudden change of attitude. They expected the critical language to survive, especially since there is much to be critical about in such a supranational political project. Many others, though equally repelled by the Joe Mifsud type of Europhiles, voted Labour anyway.
It goes without saying that Sant’s extreme post-referendum stance and his complete U-turn after the 2003 election defeat did not lend much to his credibility: – Referendum fazull! – Vote No, abstain or invalidate your vote! – Il-Partnership rebah! – Fil-Kostituzzjoni Ewropea m’hemm xejn li jwegga! – Mas-Socjalisti Ewropej nahdmu id f’id ghax l-Unjoni tista’ ssolvielna l-problemi kollha! – Min jikkritika jitkecca!
That type of opportunism does not work any longer.
The truth is, it is not all balck or white, and there is nothing wrong with critical-mindedness. Indeed, the critical analytical approach is traditionally favoured in academia, especially in the sociological and political fields.
To add to what I said above, mainly to be fair to Joe Mifsud, his type were not exactly turncoats, but apparently were pro-membership all the while. Some kept quiet, others played the hypocite’s game. What happened after the 2003 election defeat is that the few Europhiles made a sort of coup within the party, with the usual suckers following the new line. A few, like George Vella, went from one extreme type of language to the other, becoming more Europhile than the famous Sculz himself. To add insult to injury, those who were critical minded were regarded as heretics and blamed for the 2003 defeat.