Joseph Muscat is hard at work copying Barack Obama’s coalition for change. If there is a single original thought in that man’s head, somebody please tell me about it.

Obama’s coalition for change was positive and upbeat. Muscat’s coalition for change comes three years too early – he can’t keep talking about it for a whole four years – and it is negative. From what we can make out so far, it is a ragtag mess of strange bedfellows that range from the generally disaffected, to “staunch Nationalists”, fleeing AD voters, greens, liberals and now even the far right.

Apparently, he plans to be all things to all men. If you wish to fight racism, you will find your home with Joseph Muscat. And if you’d rather crack a black man’s skull, then you too will find your home with Joseph Muscat. Gay rights? Joseph Muscat. Hate gays and think they should be lynched? Joseph Muscat, he’s your man.

Muscat thought that a few hours after the death of a Sudanese immigrant, whose skull was cracked in Paceville, would be the perfect time for announcing that he wants to “listen to” people with far right sentiments and those who voted for far right parties in this election.

Perhaps he plans to convert them to progressive liberalism in his fascinating new coalition – or, as Maltastar put it, his collation.

The man who died was the very same one allegedly beaten up by the police last summer in an incident to which one of my sons was a witness, but Muscat, instead of condemning the attack like a real liberal would, said instead that the people who voted for Imperium Europa were soldiers and police officers. He wants to “listen to them”. So I guess he’s trying to form Europe’s first-ever progressive liberal far right party with a small touch of the greens.

And when the policemen and the soldiers listen to Muscat after he has listened to them, what will they hear? Not the words of a true progressive liberal, that’s for sure. To draw them into his ragtag collation, he’ll morph into a mini Mussolini and suggest that he has every respect for Norman Lowell. The man is a used-car salesman, but of the less reputable type.

He said a few days ago that the EP election result is a mandate for the Labour Party to do more than criticise: to offer solutions and work in the national interest. Funny how it took an election result to poke the Labour Party awake to the fact that this is its job. Coming from Super One, Muscat must have had a pretty skewed idea of what opposition parties do, so we can forgive him for that.

It’s not as though he’s had a long education in democracy, given that his primary education in politics was through a Mintoff-worshipping grandmother during the worst of the Mintoffian years. But let’s rush to forget that, because it isn’t convenient to remember.

His followers within the party compare him admiringly to Dom Mintoff. But he has embraced the Mintoffian element purely out of expediency, to add to the aggregate of potential votes. I used to have a moneybox when I was a child, emblazoned with the legend “Every little makes more”, and that is Muscat’s operating principle.

The strategy he is using is the exact same one Alfred Sant used in 1996 – again, not an original thought in his head. We have the repetitive emphasis on ‘fresh, young and progressive’ – Sant used ‘modern’ - and ‘old, tired and stale.’ Muscat speaks of ‘il-politika tal-passat’; Sant spoke of “il-politika mmuffata”. Muscat speaks of “in-nies l-ewwel”; Sant spoke of “ic-cittadin l-ewwel”.

Muscat, like Sant with Fenech Adami in 1996, is positioning himself as the future and Gonzi as the past. He focuses on the age-gap, like Sant did. I still remember thinking how ridiculous Sant was portraying himself as young and fresh in his late 40s and wearing false hair.

Now Muscat is talking as though he represents a tidal wave of change, rather than a jumbled accumulation of different agendas, loosely tied together by virtue of expediency, here today and very possibly gone tomorrow.

The strategy might well work for Muscat as it did for Sant in 1996. But in that case, Muscat had best consider how to handle the situation when the greens, the liberals, the far rightists, the “staunch Nationalists”, the ones who want gay rights and the ones who hate gays, all come knocking for their pound of flesh once he’s in a position to give it to them – or rather, not.

And now he has another problem. Besides the €50 million that he will fork out in VAT on car registration tax refunds, he’s also going to have to heavily subsidise water and electricity for the entire population. That canny political strategist Jason Micallef gave his word on television that it would happen, talking over Louis Grech who tried to say that the Labour Party had promised no such thing.

It will only be a matter of time before Muscat moves into stage two: the deficit (il-hofra) and corruption (barunijiet). But then again, perhaps not, given that he’s trying to enlist as many ‘barunijiet’ as he can in his progressive collation for change, alongside the greens and the environmentalists. That should make for a jolly party.

Having correctly sensed the mood now to be roughly what it was in 1996, Muscat has gone to the drawer and brought out Sant’s manual. Sant had conducted a silent campaign, as well as his loud and public one, making inroads into the Nationalist Party’s voter-base by seeking out the weak and vulnerable or the merely bored and irritated, and homing in on them. I use the word “weak” very loosely, because I find that most times people who believe they are reaching their own conclusions based on careful analysis become upset if it is suggested otherwise. So I’ll let that go.

Back then, the Nationalist Party assumed that people of a certain socio-economic profile would vote PN, and the fact that they voted Labour took the party completely by surprise. It had missed Sant’s silent campaign completely. It can’t miss Muscat’s silent campaign now because it’s out in the open, thanks to this EP election.

So here’s the insider’s guide to how you can tell that ‘staunch Nationalists’ are going to vote Labour: they won’t discuss the election and will pretend it’s not happening. Oh, there’s an election? I hadn’t noticed. If they’re planning to vote Nationalist, they won’t talk of anything but the election and they’ll be on the phone every half an hour to people they think are “in the know” to have their minds put at rest that Labour are not getting in.

Muscat told his crowds last Sunday that he has done something exceptional in persuading “people who have never voted Labour before” to vote Labour now. He is being disingenuous, of course. Sant beat him to it, and he did it in a general election and not in an EP election when people are more likely to give themselves a thrill. Indeed, if I know my crowd well enough, I would say that many of the “staunch Nationalists” who voted Labour in this EP election also voted Labour in 1996, whatever they may have told Muscat or his “tal-pepe” agents. Muscat of all people should know how very adept people can be at denying even to themselves the things they like least about their past.

Muscat doesn’t want us to remember that Sant’s was by far the greater coup, because it will weaken his self-portrayal as Moses leading the collation of change out of the desert.

This is nothing more than a copycat exercise. The fact that it works is a reflection on the truism that times change, but people really don’t.

Daphne Caruana Galizia’s blog is at www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com