With just five days of campaigning left to go – we’re meant to keep quiet on Friday, remember? – the mass of serious political issues like the government’s failure to give information on the power purchase contract it claims (under duress) to have signed, and its refusal to publish its contract with Henley & Partners on the sale of Maltese citizenship, is increasingly studded with stupidities and gimmicks.
In an attempt at retaining his seat in the European Parliament, and feeling threatened by the candidacies of former prime minister Alfred Sant and party favourites Charlon Gouder and Miriam Dalli, EP incumbent Joseph Cuschieri has promised to donate half his salary to charity if he is returned to the Parliament. The logic here is perfect Cuschieri: the vote as charitable donation.
His reasoning is: vote for me not because I make an excellent European parliamentarian and because I can argue a case really well in the House and outside it, but because by doing so, you will be donating to charity. I hear that Cuschieri is on course to be married, yet there is no mention anywhere of this being a joint decision. I wonder whether the prospective Mrs Cuschieri is thrilled to bits at the thought of living on half his salary, though she might conclude that if this is the only way her fiancé is going to be returned to the European Parliament, then it is better than living on no salary at all. I wouldn’t worry, though, because his namesake is bound to found him an alternative position, given how very much he owes him and that he would not have been able to become Leader of the Opposition without Cuschieri’s noble gesture. And with all those iced buns flying around, it would be a shame if a particularly large and lucrative one were not to end up in Cuschieri’s mouth.
Joseph Cuschieri seems particularly excited by the idea of donating half his salary and says he has received a great deal of support for the notion, from all kinds of charitable organisations. I’m not surprised, because there’s a lot of competition for free money out there. He says he will be setting up a fund to be administered by a foundation “led by a respected individual who is not involved in politics”. All this is well-meaning but very grandiose: over five years, he plans to donate €186,000 and though it is a very generous sum from one individual, it is most certainly not the stuff of which funds and foundations are made, especially not if it is that capital sum which is to be donated, rather than the interest deriving from it. That is just €37,200 a year and you can’t do very much with it in terms of supporting philanthropic organisations and charities. It is about Lm16,000 a year in old money. I strongly recommend that instead of going into the palaver of a foundation and fund to end up giving the equivalent of Lm2,000 a year to eight organisations for five years, he merely picks a children’s charity and writes it a cheque for the full €37,200 a year for five years.
The foundation bug has bitten the Labour Party really hard. Mrs Muscat has arm-twisted Bank of Valletta chairman John Cassar White (her husband’s political appointee) into setting up a foundation she can play with, and she now spends a lot of her time hosting fashion shows for the glitterati and the Botox Brigade at Girgenti Palace, Villa Francia and her husband’s office at the Auberge de Castile, ostensibly to raise funds for ‘her’ foundation. The President has also found that the Community Chest Fund is not enough for her and so she will be setting up her own rival foundation, which will presumably compete with the Community Chest Fund for donations and also in acceding to requests for help. I imagine she will use this fund to continue building her reputation as a one-woman Salvation Army.
I think Joseph Cuschieri can wave goodbye to all thought of that fund, though. The donkey vote (voting in alphabetical order) will go a long way towards working in his favour, but not if the Labour Party can help it. Alfred Sant tops the polls (“ghax miskin iggieled tant biex nibqghu barra mill-Ewropa, jixraqlu mmur Brussel”), and the party is pushing Gouder and Dalli really hard into the electorate’s face. This must be particularly galling to – especially – Cuschieri and Marlene Mizzi, the current incumbents, to say nothing of all the others on the list (one of whom can’t very well complain because he has just been made ambassador to Romania). But then that’s what you get when you pick a party that has scant respect for others, doesn’t play fair and thinks of democracy as an annoying inconvenience which it must somehow get the better of to acquire temporary power which it then treats as permanent.
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