Desperate government intensifies organised assaults on its opponents

The government, now severely crippled by major corruption scandals, cronyism and gross mismanagement, with surveys showing that public opinion has turned against it, has organised a series of assaults – using the might and weight of the party media machine – against members of the Opposition and its most vocal opponents and critics.

And worse still, it is not ashamed to say so (see below). Its agents and official communications consultants, paid by the state and working in government ministries and the Office of the Prime Minister, are out in force on Facebook and Twitter, promoting the Labour Party’s (government’s) assaults on the Opposition.

The Labour Party has always had serious problems with democracy, and I am shocked to see that in the year 2016 it still hasn’t learned the fundamentals. It is the democratic role of the Opposition to scrutinise the government and hold it to account, but when the government uses its position of power to intimidate the Opposition, that is ANTI-democratic and totally alien to a European Union member state. It is what happens in places that are alien to democracy, or have serious problems with it.

It is also clear that the decision to begin promoting these assaults (“see what we are going to reveal about our enemies this evening”) was timed to coincide with the embarrassing and difficult news that Toni Abela has been rejected for the position at the European Court of Auditors, for which Joseph Muscat had shamelessly nominated him to make way in the party deputy leadership for his henchman in corruption.

The government/Labour Party has decided to try to obscure the disastrous (for them, not for the country) news about Toni Abela’s rejection by blitzing the afternoon and evening with ‘skandli’ about the deputy leaders of the Opposition.