The Prime Minister’s New Year message: a splendid example of Maltese fanfarunagni

Standing in front of an out-of-focus Christmas tree and saying a few words about the main issues of the day, while wearing a stern expression, as the British prime minister did, is not for our Maltese fanfaron.

This video production, so obviously the work of Mario Philip Azzopardi, Taghna Lkoll arts director of Valletta 2018 and producer of the Labour Party’s much-parodied general election campaign videos, probably together with the prime minister’s consultant on national festivities, must have cost a pretty penny of taxpayers’ money.

The end result is sheer vulgarity, a perfect illustration of fanfarunagni: carrying a grand piano to the top of the cliffs and surrounding it by singers and dancers, then transporting the same grand piano up to Fort St Angelo and repeating the process – the hamallatafest Song for Europe aesthetic and mentality that now treats every public performance, even if it is a speech by the prime minister or the ceremonial appointment of the head of state, as a spectacle of song and dance.

This is all so unEuropean, so unevolved and so ‘developing backward society’ that I don’t know where to begin. This island society is sliding backwards into its southern European peasant roots instead of moving forward into civilised 21st-century Europe.

And do we really have to see yet another prime ministerial visit to yet another mittelkless kitchen in a working-class household? You’d think that the people of Malta – even the working-class people of Malta – host their guests, especially important ones like the prime minister, standing up round the kitchen island. Working-class people would never do that, and it is an insult to them to suggest otherwise.

In a working-class household, you will never be shown into the kitchen but always straight into the smart parlour where you are offered a seat immediately and provisioned with whisky, coffee, cake or biscuits.

But I suppose this is the government’s way of showing us how now even young working-class couples have fancy kitchens thanks to the policies of the Labour Party, and how those fancy kitchens (rather than, say, a proper education and graduation from the university) are turning them into the new Mittilkless. Because you know how it is, nobody sold any kitchens before 2013.

This video encapsulates so much that is wrong and self-damning about Maltese people and our government (and how that government represents the worst of Maltese values): that showy fanfarunagni, that money splashed around for show, and more emphasis placed on improving yourself by spending money on a fitted kitchen than on making yourself a better person and making the most of your potential through learning and studying and finding out about the world.

This is Malta and its values: two badly dressed, uninformed, uneducated and barely articulate people standing in their pricey new kitchen and thinking they’ve made it, while receiving the prime minister’s beaming assurance that they have.