Those press photographs of Anglu Farrugia and Marie Louise Coleiro – for that is how we know them – standing side by side in The Palace on Friday as Speaker of the House and President of Malta were quite beyond belief to those of us who were around as sentient adults in the early 1980s. Back then, Anglu Farrugia was a police inspector and considered an agent of the regime.

Back then, Marie Louise Coleiro was secretary-general of the most corrupt and violent political party Malta had ever known. Human rights violations were the default position, freedom of expression and of association were restricted to virtually nothing, and the island had descended into a sink-pit akin to Enver Hoxha’s Albania, but with factories where the minimum-wage hordes, most of whom were illiterate, sat day after day shoving things around on conveyor belts or running the same seam in the same place on the same pair of jeans under the same sewing-machine needle, endlessly. Did Marie Louise Coleiro resign in protest at the endless and myriad human rights violations that were normal daily life in Malta under her party in government? No, she did not. She stayed on.

It is on this basis that I object to the Nationalist Party’s support of her appointment as President. She is not fit to hold state office, not on the basis of her track record – and here I am talking only about her political track record, for there are those who would say that the track record of her personal life leaves her with no right to take the moral high ground as Head of State. The Nationalist Party, whose job it is to fight against the rewriting of history by the Labour Party to its own advantage, falsifying matters to make it more attractive to those who did not live through the reality, had no business giving its support to one of the key figures of those ghastly years. What is the Nationalist Party’s message here: that Marie Louise Coleiro was secretary-general of the Malta Labour Party during the very worst of its excesses, but now it’s all right to make her Head of State and it is not going to object and protest because it has been bullied into being “positive”? Supporting Mrs Preca’s appointment as Head of State was an irresponsible decision and strategically unwise. You don’t support the infliction of somebody like that on the state, because when things go wrong and when they are badly done – as the indications are already that they will be, starting with that ridiculous self-serving six-hour ceremony – you can’t say that you had nothing to do with it. What Joseph Muscat has done here is bully the Nationalist Party into supporting his poor choice of President. He wanted to remove Marie Louise Coleiro from the government and from Parliament, for reasons which will no doubt become clear, and he got the Opposition to validate his behaviour. I would have objected most forcefully to her appointment on the grounds that anybody who served Mintoff in the worst of his excesses is not fit to serve Malta except by direct election by the people over whose poor judgement nobody has any control.

Marie Louise Coleiro Preca did not even resign from her position as secretary-general of the Malta Labour Party when the party’s propaganda secretary, Stephen Ciantar (who has since become invisible) was caught producing pornographic films in which he starred, together with the Labour Party’s Pom Pom Girls. All the action was filmed at the party headquarters, which were then at the Macina in Senglea. The Pom Pom Girls were cheerleaders who used to troop out to get the crowd going at mass meetings. If all this sounds like it comes from another world, it doesn’t: the party’s secretary-general is now President. Not only is she still around, but she’s Head of State.

 

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