GUEST POST: When politicians use their position to amass illegal wealth, they are reluctant to abandon their thrones

By Georg Sapiano

Before the general election of March 2013, Simon Busuttil and I met for a coffee at Caffe Cordina, to talk politics. We sat at a corner table overlooking Old Theatre Street. Part of the discussion was to see whether I was going to stand for election of the Nationalist Party ticket – he was deputy leader at the time – but that bit did not last very long because I had been out of the political scene since 2009, and had stayed away from television and newspapers ever since.

As usual, we disagreed on a number of things. We had been at law school together but are birds of such different plumage that we never flocked together. Yet our conversations have always been good humoured and frank.

He told me then that it was vitally important that the Nationalist Party be re-elected even though it had been in government for 26 years less those 22 months when Labour, led by Prime Minister Alfred Sant, formed the government in 1996 to 1998. He gave a number of good reasons for his view, and I agreed with most of them – but on two of them we had very different positions.

Simon thought that on the 50th anniversary of Malta’s Independence (September 2014), and for the presidency of the European Council of Ministers (currently ongoing), Malta should have a Nationalist government. But I thought at the time that because Labour’s attitude to both Independence and EU membership has historically been negative, this was a good opportunity to redeem its position and bring the country together. A Labour government leading Independence Day celebrations, I thought then, and presiding over the European Council of Ministers, would bury the hatchet and we would all be united. So went the dream.

I told Simon that I thought it was time for the Nationalist Party to ‘go home’ and watch and see if Labour can govern “for five whole years, in peace and prosperity and without claims of illegitimacy, without sleaze, corruption and tear gas”. I went on to vote Nationalist, but when Labour was elected – as was inevitable, given the context – I remained hopeful that they would prove me right on the point I had made to Simon Busuttil that day at Caffe Cordina.

The last time Labour was elected and served a whole term without claims of constitutional illegitimacy was in the general election of 1976, which was 41 years ago. The Labour government led by Dom Mintoff, which was elected in 1981, had no popular mandate and the rule of law collapsed completely under the burden of government corruption, oppression, civil unrest, and human rights violations. The economy, of course, was a shambles.

In 1996, a Labour government led by Alfred Sant was elected. He ran a clean administration, but there was no prosperity either, a lot of oddball ideas and a great deal of internal strife. After just 22 months, Sant impaled himself on Mintoff’s dagger.

Enter the Golden Boy – Joseph Muscat – in 2008, with a seat in parliament acquired from the amenable Joseph Cuschieri, promising shake-ups of earth-shattering proportions. He’d been around in the Labour Party since 1992, and led the fight against EU membership, so he wasn’t new at all. But those who didn’t take an interest in politics hadn’t really noticed him, so to all intents and purposes he was new.

Muscat was elected on an anti-corruption ticket. So what a crushing sense of personal failure it must be to have to call an early election, just when he should be concentrating on the EU presidency, because his government is so deeply stuck in a mire of slime that it cannot wade on. Putting on a brave smile, in full view of the Martin Shultzes and other European socialists who came to Malta to endorse his party leadership bid, the PM is going to the country. His hope is that by polling day on the 3rd of June, despite the disgust and the defections, his majority will not be spent, that he will even win big.

I have observed that the majority of Maltese voters want a government with an eye open to opportunity and another closed to illegality. If the Muscat government excelled at anything it was at this. Yet even those who feel that Labour’s handling of the economy was good rue the rampant sense of laissez-faire and lawlessness that now pervades the country. The Panama Papers revelations last year revealed, convincingly, that the three men at the top have lived the legend by opening their eyes to opportunity for themselves and closing an eye to their own illegality.

When politicians use their position in government to amass illegal wealth, they become distinctly reluctant to abandon their thrones. That’s when the danger starts, because real threats to their power are met by real retaliation. The old fears of repression, persecution, victimisation and vengefulness, by an ill-tempered and corrupt government, are awoken again.

Whoever feels that a squeaky clean government will ruin the economy’s current pace, and that a vote for the Nationalist Party is one that will stem economic growth forgets that Eddie Fenech Adami’s government gave the country both prosperity as well as probity.

Once again, after almost three decades, references to Malta in the international press are the cause of shame and embarrassment to us. We watch as serious and credible investors are repelled by what is happening. This is just the beginning: everything will dry up if we re-elect to government a party which Muscat has hijacked and refashioned in his own image, for his own ends. For then the message read outside Malta will be that it is not only the government which is corrupt, but the people of Malta too, because they enjoy the corruption and vote for it.

It did not turn out as I’d hoped back in 2013. Labour did not do the right thing, and has let too many people down. One of them, who voted for Muscat in the last election, told me how disappointed he is that although he lowered the bar of his expectations, Muscat still managed to roll right under it.