Somebody should ask Alex Borg Olivier when he last voted, let alone voted Nationalist
I am sick to the gills of seeing Alexander Borg Olivier cheerleading for Adrian Delia in a sea of thinly-veiled spite for his predecessors. Mr Borg Olivier was conspicuous by his absence at the various demonstrations of protest against government corruption, in favour of free speech, and at the Nationalist Party’s mass rallies in the general election campaign, even though other members of his family were conspicuously there.
A recipient of government nepotism in the 1960s – when he first got his connections and position in New York through the agency of his father the Prime Minister, and of government cronyism when the Nationalists were returned to power in 1987 and he was appointed Malta’s representative at the UN, he then embarked on a three-decade-long tantrum when Guido Demarco had himself appointed president of the United Nations General Assembly (“il-president tad-dinja”, as my contemporaries might recall).
With a sense of entitlement that rivals that of Frank Portelli and Adrian Delia, the manifestation of ‘golden child’ syndrome (the only clever and therefore special one among the siblings, or rather, the one led to believe that, because it’s often untrue), Alex Borg Olivier believed that position to have been his. He never forgave Guido Demarco and his boss Eddie Fenech Adami for letting him get away with it – though it was one of the ways in which Dr Fenech Adami managed the thorn in his side – and I have good reason to believe that he has not voted since, let alone voted Nationalist.
So much for “my party”, “our party”, and all talk of past glory and other such tripe. The Nationalist Party’s most successful years in terms of achievement were the ones when it was led by Dr Fenech Adami and Mr Borg Olivier was not voting for it because Guido Demarco had been made il-president tad-dinja instead of him.
Mr Borg Olivier is not Nationalist, because one is what one votes. He is the quintessential “ex PN”, the sulker, the one who is ‘hurt’ not because he was kicked in the face by Nationalist politicians wearing jackboots and then thrown into prison on trumped-up charges, but because – after a lifetime of getting what he wanted through cronyism and a special sense of entitlement, trading on his father’s connections and then his father’s legacy, he expected another appointment to which he wasn’t necessarily entitled on the basis of merit, and didn’t get it.
True, seeing Guido Demarco appoint himself must have really stuck in his craw. Demarco was a sleazy man who counted Dom Mintoff among his friends when he was supposed to be fighting him. But we’re all supposed to be grown-ups here and mentally healthy adults are supposed to move past that kind of thing instead of getting stuck on it for decades.
Did Alex Borg Olivier vote last June? I sincerely hope so, and that it was for the Nationalist Party. I know people who have refused invitations to lunch knowing that he would be there because they couldn’t bear listen to any more of his spiteful remarks and complaining about the Nationalist Party.
I also distinctly remember his wife as a guest on some show on the Labour Party’s television station, in a most inappropriate context, and wondering what on earth had possessed her to do something like that.
I have another point to make, and I don’t apologise if it sounds ageist. The older people get, and especially when they are at the end of their life as Alex Borg Olivier is, who must be in his early 70s by now or close to it, their perspective should shift and they should consider their opinions and their judgement more carefully because of consequences intended and unintended.
They will not be around to contend with the consequences of what they helped bring about, and if they are, those consequences will not have a severe or long-term deleterious impact on their lives as they will for young people. The old men and old women who voted for Dom Mintoff in 1971, turfing out Alex Borg Olivier’s father, destroyed the hopes and potential of an entire generation of my contemporaries, with the effects still being felt today. To them it was just a vote, and many of them died or were on a pension anyway. But to us, who were children and then teenagers, the effects were prolonged and they were difficult.
There are times when selfishness and egocentricity can be taken a little too far.
Sometimes, we have to put our own personal feelings of spite aside for the greater good.