For a government to survive, it has to be in touch with the zeitgeist, which means the spirit of the times. The zeitgeist of Malta in 2007 is not what it was in 1998, 1996, 1992 and certainly not 1987. That much should be obvious, because if it remained unchanged for that long, we would be a Sicilian mountain village around 1800. The spirit of the times changes slowly, but then speeds up, and when it does so, the effect is cumulative, fast, and widespread.
The changes in Malta since 2000 have been greater and more far-reaching than those of any other seven-year period, I would say, in our documented history. They are the years in which the glass bubble encasing Malta finally shattered. Not even the years of the Second World War, when Malta crumbled and starved, brought about such fundamental change. There was change while it was going on, but when the mess was cleared up afterwards, everything went back to what it was in 1938.
Things cannot go back to what they were in the 1970s, 1980s or even 1990s now, though there are some nostalgia-driven groups who think they can. They haven’t picked up the zeitgeist. These far-right-wing groups have cottoned on at least to the fact that things are not quite what they were, that people think and behave differently now. That’s more than can be said for many of our politicians on both sides of the house, who haven’t even picked up on change, who think and speak in terms of “keeping things the way they are” – the way they were 20 years ago, they mean.
Money has helped, of course. Even those in lowly jobs now have comforts that wouldn’t have been possible 20 years ago. But to imagine that it is all about better earnings is to be simplistic. It was the Internet, cable television and satellite connections that kick-started the fastest snowball of change that Malta has ever known. Those three wonders of contemporary life have plugged Maltese society into the electric circuit of the outside world.
We can’t be unplugged again. Right up until our own time, Malta was what it was because the Maltese were completely cut off. We had contact with outsiders, with people from foreign parts, in pretty much the same way that native islanders had contact with visiting ships in the South Sea Islands 200 years ago. We hailed them, gave them food and water in exchange for beads and necklaces, waved them back on their way, and went back to our villages to proceed with our simple lives and our backward customs. The one thing we didn’t do was to eat the visitors or kill them, though we might have tried that on a couple of occasions.
Governments survived by keeping the people they governed in strict isolation, by encouraging this sense of being apart from the rest of the world. This was particularly obvious during the premiership of Dom Mintoff and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, whose economic policy was one of protectionism that cut us off from our main means of contact with the outside world: trade. During those years, Malta’s isolation came as close as it could have to that of the countries behind the Iron Curtain, without going for the whole hog of Communism. The Catholic Church maintained its stranglehold on the private lives of Malta’s citizens and on Maltese society in general only because Malta was cut off from the social changes happening in western and even in southern Europe.
By bringing Malta into the 21st century and plugging the island – I use the singular deliberately – into contemporary Europe, this government has sown the seeds of its own downfall. It has enabled people to see what they don’t have. I am not talking about material things here, in the same way that Albanians see Italy as a kind of wonderland because of all the consumer goods advertised on Italian television, which they can pick up. No, I am talking about ways of life, ways of looking at things, civil liberties, a greater openness, a sense of possibility, the difference between the village and the nation. Log onto the outside world and one of the first things you realise is that Malta feels like a village and not like a nation. This is not just because of size, but because of the mentality of the people running the place, the way politicians in both main parties speak and behave, the disregard for civil liberties.
We have all the trappings of a nation, but Malta is run like a large village and the government behaves like the village council. National politicians who sit in parliament behave like they’re at a weekly meeting of the village elders. Sometimes, when I chance upon the parliamentary debates on radio, I freeze in dismay. To get elected, these people have to fiddle about with the petty details of village life – which means that they have to be that kind of person to start with – and their minds and behaviour get locked into pettiness.
A columnist on another newspaper wondered aloud last Sunday why the political parties can’t attract the right kind of candidates. The candidate lists for both parties, he wrote, made him want to weep and tear out his hair. I’ll tell him something for nothing: it’s because, to survive in Maltese politics, you must have a petty nature. You must have an eye for the petty details, rather than the big picture. The only exception to prove this rule was Eddie Fenech Adami, who didn’t give a damn about the petty details, but whose fixation on the big picture changed Malta positively and permanently – thank heavens.
I look at the gamut of politicians on both sides of the house, the candidate lists, the what-have-yous, and there is nobody I want to vote for. Nobody. Not one person. They all give me hives. And now I don’t even have a reason to see them as the means to the end of European Union membership. It’s like going to a party at 16 and finding wall-to-wall nerds with whom you have absolutely nothing to talk about. What a nightmare.
Significant numbers of the best and the brightest of the younger generations are fleeing, literally fleeing, Malta. They are following the zeitgeist in search of a contemporary life. Malta was once a prison from which only the very lucky few could escape. It is a prison no longer, and the government has to adapt its thinking and behaviour to suit. By listening only to those sectors of society which are most resistant to change and the least likely to change – the old, the religious, the ultra-conservative – they are preparing the way for disaster.
The gulf between this traditional audience for the Nationalist Party, and the growing liberal sector of Maltese society which once voted for it, is now so wide that it is unbridgeable. What has happened is that the latter group – and make no mistake, the number runs into many thousands – now perceive the Nationalist Party as stuffy, backward and old-fashioned, in danger of keeping us anchored to old mores for which we no longer have any use. These people, of whom I am one, supported the Nationalist Party wholeheartedly in the past because it represented the road out towards contemporary European life. Now it represents the opposite: the road back to the village. There is no joy to be found either in the Labour Party, which comes across as even more backward and old-fashioned; Labour politicians seem to come from an even smaller village than Nationalist politicians.
Not voting, voting Labour or voting Alternattiva, will get us a government of politicians from the smaller village, the greater of two evils. Voting Nationalist will get us a government of politicians from the slightly bigger village, the lesser of two evils, but also a shoring up of the status quo. There is no light at the end of this tunnel, which is why increasing numbers of young people are seeing flight as their personal solution. Yes, as some people tell me, it’s possible to live comfortably in Malta whoever is in government. That’s not the point. Contentment with comfort is for the old, for those who have given up on life and its possibilities. Those who haven’t yet settled for a retirement state of mind want to be connected, they want possibility, and they want to be part of life and part of the world. They don’t want to be cossetted in a glass bubble, and told that Malta is different and because it is different, it is better. They know that’s not the case.