Mein liebe Schulz

When the Labour leader finds himself in a bit of a tight spot, he calls in the Big Gun, mein liebe Martin Schulz.

When he wanted Labour delegates to see how important he was in the big scheme of European things, so that they would vote him in to the party leadership, he flew in Schulz to sit by his side at a press conference and tell everyone what a clever boy he is.

Now he’s at it again. Last Friday at that May Day rally, he waved a piece of A4 paper about and announced with pride that it was a letter from mein liebe Schulz, leader of the European socialists.

He didn’t read it out and he didn’t fax it to the media, so for all we know it was just something that Toni Abela cobbled together for fun, like his letter from Barack Obama, which he read out at another Labour rally some months back (Obama is fluent in the idiom of working-class Maltese, apparently).

So mein liebe Schulz told Muscat – and here I have no choice but to quote Muscat because I can’t quote Schulz – that he is pledging his support to Malta “as a country with a unique problem of illegal immigration”.

Schulz, too, speaks the idiom of working-class Maltese. “Malta cannot wait for the EU anymore,” Muscat told us he told him. Malta needs to be treated as a special case because the issue has become “too sensitive and urgent”.

Yes, and? Presumably, if the leader of the European Socialists has pledged his support on the matter of illegal immigration, then he has pledged that support to Malta and not to the Labour Party. It is not a fine distinction. It is a large and bright one, with bells on.

Muscat, like Alfred Sant, Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici and Dom Mintoff before him, trades on the ignorance of those who crowd up to listen to his words of wisdom.

He knows that those people will be impressed if they are allowed to think that when the leader of the European Socialists pledges his support to the country, then he is pledging it to the opposition party rather than to the government.

I must say, meaning absolutely no disparagement to the large numbers of highly educated people who support the Labour Party, that when the bulk of your support comes from people with the thinking skills of a cunning native and nothing else, then you have a really massive advantage over the competition, whose supporters are more critical and less easily hoodwinked and talked down to.

That’s the main reason why – the secondary reason being the national predisposition towards hdura – that the two parties run neck and neck despite one being a bunch of people who couldn’t organise their way out of a paper-bag, and the other being – well, the people who revamped this place and took us into the eurozone.

So if mein liebe Schulz wishes to pledge his support to Malta in the ongoing illegal immigration debacle, then as a seasoned politician and not a Super One reporter promoted beyond his abilities he knows what to do: ring the prime minister, and not write to the leader of the Labour Party.

This is an excerpt from an article published in The Malta Independent on Sunday today.