The Nationalist Party is in dire straits. Those dire straits are financial, but from that, all else springs – or doesn’t. Unless the money problems are sorted out, the political problems can’t be tackled. When a political party is constantly worried about where to get the millions to pay its debts, it is distracted from its proper objective of developing policy and playing an effective part in the actual political life of this country. More to the point, these severe difficulties on the home front mean that it is failing to put an effective opposition to the government, despite there being enough matters of concern for the Nationalists to have a real field day.
This is not just about paying its bills before it can find the money to spend on proper research into policy and electors’ views, and then after this on presenting that policy to those electors. This is about the danger to the effective functioning of democracy if we carry on for even just a few months longer with a government that considers itself omnipotent, unassailable and impervious to criticism, and an Opposition that manifests all the symptoms – if such symptoms can be attributed to an organisation – of the clinically depressed.
The Opposition is simply not putting up any opposition to the government, beyond the most starkly obvious matters about which it must feel that it has no choice but to speak. And even then, what is said is weak and inadequate. True, it is summer, but the feeling one gets is that summer has little or nothing to do with this malaise. The true reason is the mountain of financial and organisational problems.
The Nationalist Party’s print and broadcast media have been weakened immeasurably by the laying-off of part-time staff (many of whom have not been paid yet) and the difficulties in paying full-time employees. This now means that the playing field is so uneven as to be literally tilted. The government and the Labour Party have been able to dominate the media by using their own structures and those of others. The Opposition and the Nationalist Party, meanwhile, have been left virtually unable, even if they are willing (which they seem not to be) to get their message across.
The Nationalist Party’s administrative structure has been hit as heavily, and without that structure, it can’t fight the battles it needs to fight, do the work that it needs to do. We saw the terrible consequences of this – terrible consequences for the distortion of democracy, that is – over the last five years and most particularly in the last few months leading up to the election campaign. The result? Lies, false promises, promises that were real but outrageous, and the general madness of crowds won the day. Countering them proved impossible, because there was a general suspension of people’s critical faculties and the wisdom that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. And there was clearly neither the money nor the organisation to fight back.
The harsh reality is that party donors in Malta are not interested in democracy or political issues. They are interested in backing the winner for what they can get out of that winner. Labour cleverly created the right environment for a mass exodus of donors from the Nationalist Party to its own doors by from the outset behaving as if a Labour victory was inevitable. Yes, given the situation it was, indeed, inevitable – but it is unusual for politicians who are certain of victory to speak and behave as though they are certain of victory, because that is usually interpreted as arrogance and puts people off.
Yet in the particular set of circumstances that prevailed over the period, the opposite was true. The more Labour spoke about the mythical paradise of meritocracy that would be created ‘when’ rather than ‘if’ it got into government, the more the electorate began to see it as a certainty and to want to be part of that certainty. And the more donors moved to Labour with their millions. Basically, we had a situation in which being perceived to be the winner actually made Labour the winner. Of course, it also made Malta the loser – but in a campaign like that, reality counts for nothing and perception is all.
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