The link has yet to be forged between personal benefit and the common good

I have read this newspaper column by Ranier Fsadni.

He writes that 26% of those who voted for Muscat now voted for the Nationalist Party at some point in the past, which means that they respond to appeals to the greater good. While I agree with him almost every time, in this case I do not.

I was sufficiently involved in the campaign for the Yes vote for EU membership to understand even at the time that the strongest appeal was the one which told people they would make more money with Malta in the European Union – which was correct, but hardly an ideal of European unity.

If you go back and examine the Yes vote’s campaign at the time, you will see that it was based largely on telling individual groups of people what was in it for them personally and for their sector/stakeholder group.

The biggest resistance Yes campaigners met with was from those who could see that EU membership was for the greater good, but who still wanted to vote against it because their own personal interests would be negatively affected by freedom of movement. That their protected business would take a knock in the face of increased competition was the most common reason.

Some of us, when speaking to people back then, even directly encountered a perversion of amoral familism (the southern Mediterranean doctrine by which the family is supreme and comes before the common good and the law of the land) in which parents, while acknowledging that EU membership would widen their children’s horizons, said that they would vote against it because they didn’t want their children to leave Malta.

The flipside of voting for something for your own narrow interests is voting against something for your own narrow interests. In the EU membership referendum campaign, Yes campaigners had to work on both: persuade people to vote for membership because it would benefit them personally, and convince those who, while they could see that EU membership would be good for Malta, planned to vote against it because it wouldn’t be good for them personally.

All this had to be done in the face of Joseph Muscat’s (“unity”, “progress”) relentless, five-year scaremongering campaign with which he convinced 45% of the electorate that EU membership would destroy Malta and its economy.

Also, it is as clear as day to me, given that I was around at the time and even had a home of my own to run and a baby to look after, that what drove people to vote Labour out in 1987 was not the beatings, the violence, the human rights violations or the murders at the Police HQ. It wasn’t even the horrendous corruption or the shocking unemployment levels and lack of prospects.

It was the daily frustrations of shopping for a family and finding nothing in the (very few) shops, of having to pay black-market prices for ordinary foodstuffs smuggled in and sold under the counter. It was not being able to find something as basic as a pair of tights or jeans, or good shoes for your children.

I think that if we were somehow able to go back in time and examine the 1987 vote, we would find that it was primarily women who voted against the Labour government of the day, because back then it was women (men didn’t get involved at the time, unlike today) who had the full burden of shopping for food, clothes and basic necessities for their family in an impossible situation where you had to trawl round the grocers of three towns or villages – if you even had a car – to assemble the ingredients for a meal.

On the whole, we can see that people vote for the greater good when it coincides with their own maximum personal benefit. That it coincides with their maximum personal benefit is purely incidental, because the maximum personal benefit tends to be prioritised.

Only 55% of the electorate voted for EU membership, and Eddie Fenech Adami scraped into power in 1987 with just a 4,000-vote majority, even though the country was wrecked and on its knees.

People, on the whole, tend to do what’s best for themselves. This is quite normal. The thing that has gone wrong in Maltese society is that the link between what’s best for yourself and what’s best for society in the medium to long term was never forged. There are glimmers of hope, though. It seems quite obvious to me that the ABC1 switchers who voted Labour for the first time in 2013 and who now switched back in droves – they were visible everywhere – did so because they fully understand that a society poisoned by top-to-bottom corruption and the undermining of institutions is one in which it becomes increasingly unsafe to live.