GUEST POST: It’s about government, not elections
He suckered Cuschieri into handing over his seat, and now he's going to sucker the disillusioned mittel-aged into giving him the government.
A substantial body of opinion suggests that Malta should go to the polls because the situation in parliament has become untenable.
Even the normally cautious The Times has claimed editorially that it is ‘wise’ to do so.
Well, is it? Let’s take stock of the givens.
The last six months have proved that the government’s parliamentary majority is constantly threatened by three of its backbenchers for the most spurious, self-interested and personal reasons.
The only weight that these reasons have is derived exclusively and abusively from the Nationalist Party’s one-seat majority, and not from what they add to the public good.
Is there anyone out there still foolish enough to doubt that Franco Debono, Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando and Jesmond Mugliett are driven, respectively, by blind ambition, vicious personal vendettas and bitterness?
Is it wise, therefore, to bring down a democratically elected government because three backbenchers have betrayed the mandate given to them by, well, we, the people? By their constituents who want the Nationalist Party to govern, led by Lawrence Gonzi? No.
An election today, as one public opinion survey piling up on top of another demonstrates, would almost certainly deliver a Labour government and install Joseph Muscat as prime minister. Consequently, the one, the only, measure of the ‘wisdom’ of holding a election now is whether it will it be better for us, for the country, to have a Labour government.
And what is the basis for claiming that an election, with Prime Minister Muscat as the result, and a cabinet made up of the likes of Anglu Farrugia, Karmenu Vella and Silvio Parnis, would be better for Malta than the government and prime minister we have today?
The living wage which will ground businesses to the ground?
The pie in the sky promise to lower the water and electricity rates?
The promise to flout international laws protecting illegal immigrants from drowning on the high seas?
A cabinet minister (Joe Mizzi) who claims that he will find oil the minute he’s in power, by magic?
Beyond these mad claims masquerading as policies, there is nothing but a gaping, scary void. We just do not know what Joseph Muscat will do after an election because he’s interested in power, not in what he can do with it that might make all our lives better.
He scurries away from the very essence of politics, which is saying what he’ll do with power, because he’s terrified of saying something which might jeopardise his acquisition of it.
Therefore, all he does is rabbit on about roadmaps, cheerlead for a movement which exists only in his head, and pick up dregs from every political gutter he comes across.
Finally, given that it is trendy among the seriously and irreversibly middle-aged to believe that it is ‘wise’ to have Joseph Muscat as prime minister, and to have him installed in Castille now, can we at least have an inkling of the mettle of the man?
His behaviour during the last couple of weeks gives us more than an inkling. A prime minister-in-waiting associating himself with the lie that Richard Cachia Caruana used to protect cocaine-snorting friends? Peddling the lie that the 9-inch knife thrust into Richard Cachia Caruana’s back had Guido de Marco and Lawrence Gatt’s metaphorical fingerprints on it?
Using an illicitly recorded conversation of a person and private moment of no public interest, as distinct from public curiosity, when you run the alternative government and not one of Rupert Murdoch’s ill-fated newspapers?
If putting such a man in Castille is supposed to be wise, then I’m running away with the next circus that comes to town. It’s a more suitable and fitting ‘mittil’aged thing to do than voting somebody like that into power.
15 Comments Comment
Leave a Comment
I suspect it’s all a big game of chicken. Nobody wants to be the one to actually force the election.
The unmentionable ones keep hovering at the edge, but step back from the brink at the last moment.
“Whoever is elected to government in the next election will most probably be responsible for Malta’s first EU presidency in the first six months of 2017.”
God forbid the humiliation we have to go through if PL are in government.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20120723/local/Malta-s-first-EU-presidency-in-2017.429727
Do you rely believe that a bunch of self conceited half-witted individuals, all with a distinct concept of what politics is all about, with no common ideology or principle as a cohesive force between them so much so that they cannot any longer call themselves a political part but rally under a banner of a so called movement, could ever aspire to a common goal and survive for a whole term of five years in office?
There’s this legend going around that the sooner Labour are elected to power the sooner the disaster, and then it’s everyone back to the PN.
Its promoters know it to be a fallacy, yet they stoke it.
It’s as if Labour deserves to win simply to keep the status quo, having it perpetually looming on the horizon, a travesty of alternating power.
If this is the logic, the inverse might also be true, Labour defeated again could result in the unthinkable.
Hoping a Labour government will fold, predictable given the incompatible factions, is an unecessary exercise.
I really cannot imagine the traditional hardcore lending their ears to Manuel Mallia or Deborah Schembri’s contributions at the obligatory post electoral conference after another defeat.
It will also return the standards, rendering this chapter a curious anecdote relating when Labour had elves.
This is exactly the point. Is it wise to send Lawrence Gonzi to the opposition benches just because the Three Witches of Eastwick have decided to call it a day? (more of a night really, but anyway).
I’m sick of repeating the same thing to whomever is foolish enough to raise this point with me in order to provoke me.
People in Malta are waking up, going to work, with no care in the world really, then go back home to a house which they have a mortgage on, they go out in the evenings, they enjoy summer, many of them oblivious to the economic carnage which is going on in other countries.
I am not even referring to all those thousands who will go on some sort of holiday, with paid accommodation (as opposed to staying at a friend’s house, for example) and away from home.
I am not referring to those who have bought a luxury car from the UK or who have two jobs.
I was at the beach yesterday and happened to overhear a conversation whereby one mother of a new graduate was proudly relaying to another parent of another new graduate of the job which her newly-graduated son has just landed in a top Maltese company. His results came out two weeks ago.
The interlocutor was happily recounting how her two daughters (fresh young graduates themselves) were happily engaged in some firm which specialises in top-level consultancy. I have to say that overhearing this conversation hurt me because people just take it for granted that these things come down from heaven like manna and that we have always been like this and that we will always be like this.
In other words, we’re living a good life. We might not be over-the-top rich. We have to work hard. However, if we work, if we study, we find opportunities. If we commit ourselves to something, we get a gain out of it.
Yet, we have three huge pigs in our Parliament, who hanker for more and more power, or more and more attention, and who are putting the spokes in the wheels of our government and our country just because they are, needless to say, three huge pigs (in the symbolic sense of the word).
In other countries, governments are dissolved because of a million and one reasons, all involving serious crises, normally.
However, lest I be seriously misinformed, personal vendettas have never featured so high in the demolition of one government.
In a time of serious economic woes, our government had to be mostly occupied by playground games, fit only for schoolchildren who haven’t yet mastered elementary skills.
This is where I despair and this is why recently I switched off from Maltese news.
No, we cannot send Malta to the polls lest we’d want to give democracy in Malta the coup de grace. Not with its present government, certainly, and certainly not at the price of risking to be run by this circus of fools that is the PL because Malta deserves better. Whether the people know they deserve better that’s another story.
I, for one, know I deserve better. Let’s hope the majority of us, when the time comes, (and certainly it is not now), understand that we all deserve better, irrespective of our political passions.
It has been some time that a pattern has been slowly emerging. Just check who the PL’s prime targets are and you can safely say that those are the persons they fear most and whom they see as a major obstacle for their success to be in government.
These include Lawrence Gonzi, Richard Cachia Caruana, Tonio Fenech and Daphne. The fiercer the criticism, the more value these people have. I did not mention Mifsud Bonnici because I qualify his resignation as a result of Franco’s personal vendetta.
I always wondered, and others do so too, what difference a few months are going to make for the PL. Calling an election now or in a couple of months time doesn’t make a difference to us out here. It must be that they don’t want to undergo the test of a real and proper election campaign. They bet on a surprise election, possibly with a scandal attached.
I would go on with parliamentary business as usual, as if there were no JPOS, Mugliett and Debono. The minute any one of these feels he should vote out the government he may do so and bear the brunt of his actions.
Jattakkaw ukoll bla razan nies teknici li jaghtu kontribut fis-settur pubbliku, u lil membri tac-civil. Il-Labour ta’ Muscat jaghmel minn kollox biex inaffar nies ta’ stoffa mil-hajja pubblika.
forsi minhabba il-kumpless kbir ta’ inferjorita’ fil-kamp Laburista, li jispikka fil-figura ta’ Muscat u martu.
It gets scarier and scarier.
So some of those who support the PN are openly saying, now, that the electorate should rather not be given a say on how this country should be governed because if they are trusted with a choice, they will make the wrong one!
If there is one admission of a total failure of the PN government, this must be it.
The PN, through its leaders and speakers, has boasted that it has created “democracy” in Malta. That the democratic process has become a normal thing, much different from what it was a couple of decades ago. But creating a democracy means nothing if the people are not given the power to make a choice.
This opinion expressed in this post sheds doubts on the ability of the electorate, the majority of whom grew up knowing only a PN government, to choose their government. This is the most dangerous anti-democratic there can be.
In any case, how long can the Prime Minister hold out?
This legislature, now being kept alive artificially, will anyway die next May, at the very latest. What then? Should some excuse be invented to suspend democracy at that moment, if the polls still indicate a Labour victory? And how is the PN planning to change the indications coming out of the opinion polls?
It is very clear now that the PN is prepared to play very, very dirty to hold on to power at all costs. And it has already done so, as was yesterday exposed in one newspaper. Now it’s very clear why JPO can’t forgive the PN strategists.
The circus is well and truly in town Daphne, Hamrun to be exact. They’re in permanent residence in the pink big top at Mile-End.
An excellent post.
Very evidently the author does not face dozens of Maltese voters with a pathetically low IQ every day, like I have done for the past 45 years.
From what I can see, it is advisable that he joins the next circus this coming Christmas unless that will be already too late.
Nothing changes the fact that the government is currently unable to govern. Elections need to be called, the situation is untenable. it is the responsible thing to do. Then let the people decide.
You can’t think outside the box, Daph. Try seeing the less obvious: this country’s much-needed development from the ground-zero of 1987 has been largely funded by wage/salary earning individuals. A lot of them feel they’ve carried the can long enough (ie bankrolled huge overruns on mega-projects which seem to benefit only the inner circle).
For God’s sake, haven’t you even noticed that it’s been two years since we could drive anywhere in this country? Haven’t you noticed that wage earners pay high taxes because many don’t? Do you never see car prices in other countries advertised on TV? Are you happy living in a permanent building site?
Do you really think it’s that difficult for Labour convincing people it can do better?
[Daphne – Chris, I didn’t write this piece. It’s a guest post.]
“been two years since we could drive anywhere in this country?” – and you (and Hamburger Joe) are advocating lowering the price of cars?
“Haven’t you noticed that wage earners pay high taxes because many don’t?” – actually Malta has one of the lowest rates of tax in Europe. With Hamburger Joe’s fixation of lowering the electricity and water bills and his other zillion, take 5, pay for half, promises, taxes shall go up. And guess what? These shall be paid by the wage earners.
“Are you happy living in a permanent building site?” – on the advice of one of his business forum buddies, the peaceful and saintly Sandro, Hamburger Joe has declared that he wants to dismantle the bureaucracy associated with the building permits and even more wants to start land reclamation – basically increasing the building sites.
Do you consider that these are how the movement without a name, can do better?
You miss the point completely, Snoopy – I’m just saying that it’s been made tooooo easy for Dr Muscat & Co. to claim they can do better.
That’s a country mile from saying they WILL do better.
Of course, anyone with two brain cells to rub together will agree with you, as I myself do.
But how many of our electorate have even that many?
Smell the coffee: there are a lot of people out there who, after struggling to/from work (or try getting to Gozo etc), in a car that costs them more than anywhere else in the world except Denmark, sit back and say “this is the thanks I get for giving Gonzi 35% of my salary + NIC + VAT. Come the election, I’ll sort him out”
Your inability to see this (and Gonzi PN’s) is what will cost PN the election.
Very good analysis. Unfortunately for Malta, the Labour party hasn’t got a political school of thought and training.
It was socialism with its misbegotten and evil ethics, but what is it now that Labour stands for?
They are just a group of awkward and amateurish pseudo politicians whose main aim and scope is cosmetic in nature.
They cannot be taken seriously in politics because they have made such a mess of this country when they were in office.
No wonder so many have fear of them, and they themselves know this because they they go to great lengths to dispel this notion.