It was bound to happen. Joseph Muscat has had the most incredibly easy ride since he became Labour leader four-and-a-half years ago. He rode into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey called Joseph Cuschieri, and journalists, electors, and business leaders, some of them waving palm-fronds, were favourably impressed.
They were favourably impressed not by anything he did or said, but by the things that he did not do or say. They were so relieved that here, at last, we had a Labour leader who looked normal, with a wife, two children, a house, car and average physical appearance, with no wigs, mad quirks, big belts, savage aggression, strange household set-ups or odd clothes and weirdo policies, that they accepted him as happily and unquestioningly as one would a badly-made polyester dress back in the shopping desert that was 1980s Labour Malta.
Nobody asked Joseph Muscat any questions. Nobody tried to pin him down to the specifics. Nobody asked him what he meant when he spouted platitude after platitude. Nobody challenged him or rooted around for the solid stuff among the hogwash (they’d have been disappointed).
When I say ‘nobody’, I am – of course – generalising. Some people did try to get him to say what he planned to do other than work on a campaign that would make him prime minister. Some people did try to find out why he was under such pressure to bring down the government before its term was up (that worked well, didn’t it – this was the longest Nationalist term of office ever). But they did so in a wilderness.
Everybody else, some of them working for the country’s most important newspapers, took Joseph Muscat at face value, reported his words without analysing them or looking into what they actually meant, and just let it go. One newspaper – MaltaToday – never really wrote anything about the Labour Party at all. I can’t remember the last time I saw a photograph of Muscat in its pages, or a searching assessment of what he stands for.
So for the last four-and-a-half years, Muscat has been in heaven. “If this is what being a party leader is like,” he must have thought to himself every night, “then please, give me more. And being prime minister must be even better.”
Then the bell sounded and the election campaign proper began. And suddenly, Muscat and his people didn’t really know what had hit them. They had become so accustomed, as had the rest of us, to hearing that the parties have been in election mode ever since June 2008, that they thought it would be like this straight through to 7th March, with one day of reflection, one day of voting, and then up the stairs to the big office in the Auberge de Castille – with nobody asking questions and reporters smiling benignly in his direction then rushing off to report his platitudes.
But it’s not like that, is it? The parties were not in campaign mode. This is campaign mode. Less than a week into the campaign and the cracks are showing already. Reporters are asking searching questions, the other party has begun to fight back in earnest when before it was like watching a sheep being kicked, electors begin reading, listening and watching more attentively, looking at the details, discussing them at work and at home.
Platitudes are no longer enough. Facts matter. This is when people become really hungry for them and reporters, under pressure from their readers and listeners, seek them out. And that is why the Labour Party’s plan on water and electricity is being ripped apart.
Election campaigns are when people stop seeing politics as a sideshow with politicians as entertainers, and begin to see them for what they are: as the people who can, by what they do or fail to do, make or break the way they live. Suddenly, competence becomes an issue. Overnight, politicians are slammed up against the wall and felt down for hidden weapons (so to speak). And nothing is a joke any longer.
When, on the second day of the campaign, the Labour Party unveiled its plan for lowering electricity tariffs, there was a moment of frozen silence as people tried to absorb the enormity of what had been said. Build a new power station and attendant infrastructure to lower bills by €100 per household per year? Isn’t that like building a new house to save replacing some of the window panes in the one you have now?
In the stunned silence that followed, people tried to assemble their thoughts. Journalists, transfixed by incredulity – some of them because they had had so much faith in Joseph Muscat and his self-confidence – tried to sort out the facts, so as to ask questions, to get answers. Then the barrage began. Under siege, Muscat disappeared on a tour of Malta, sometimes standing on a platform, sometimes in a polystyrene igloo, leaving a complete unknown Konrad Mizzi, to face the firing squad practically alone. And Konrad Mizzi, a totally inexperienced politician, isn’t coping. Toni Abela, an experienced politician, didn’t cope either – largely because he doesn’t know what it is he is supposed to be saying. As for Karmenu Vella – well, I think at this stage Muscat can write him off because he’s suddenly looking a whole lot older and more doddery than his 62 years, though that won’t stop him making a land-grab, in a manner of speaking, when Labour gets into government. As for Louis Grech, touted as the one who would help swing it for Labour among the switchers, is looking absolutely exhausted and haggard, and just can’t perform in any talking situation that isn’t lunch, a dinner party or cocktails.
It’s all quite sad, really. If reporters had questioned Muscat more, challenged him better (he wasn’t challenged at all), then his shortcomings would have been exposed a whole lot earlier than in the eight weeks before polling day. Then something might have been sorted out. Now, it’s too late. It’s too late for the Labour Party, too late for electors, and basically, too late for Malta.
Joseph Muscat has set about buying his premiership with a power-station deal, and before long, it’s the country that will pay the price.
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