The new Nationalist Party candidate, Salvu Mallia, stood outside the Office of the Prime Minister yesterday, wearing half a sandwich-board decrying government corruption and the European Commission's tacit approval of it through its silence.
He did what the entire Nationalist Party should have done, but did not. Yes, Simon Busuttil spoke about the exact same thing to the full audience of European Commissioners in parliament on the first day of Malta's presidency of the European Council, earlier this week. That was an excellent move, but it was not enough. Other tactics are required too - tactics which show popular disapproval and outrage. If the Labour Party and the government it forms thinks there is no disapproval and outrage, it is sorely mistaken, even deluded.
The only reason that anger does not break out in ways that are more visible, detectable and reportable is because people are afraid of the Labour Party, and have always been. They are not afraid of the Nationalist Party. They will insult its politicians to their faces. Nobody does that with Labour, because Labour is malign and frightening.
The trouble with members of parliament is that they appear to believe their political place is solely in parliament itself. But those days are gone, as the changes sweeping the world are now showing us only too clearly. Seeing Salvu Mallia - who is not even a member of parliament - standing there alone only served to highlight the fact that the rest of the Nationalist Party was absent.
And where were the others? Actively speaking against him within the party structures, or by their blanket silence showing that they would rather he wasn't anywhere near them at all. They are fools to be that way, fools who haven't sniffed the wind. Worse still, many of them quite obviously fail to understand that the Labour Party is deliberately stirring up trouble for Mallia and discord around him. This is its way of putting so much pressure on the Nationalist Party that they will get rid of him in the very same way that they tossed David Thake off Radio 101. Both Thake and Mallia are, for different but similar reasons, the kind of people the Labour Party most fears. Think about it: it is exactly what the Labour Party and its supporters tried and still try to do with me: putting pressure on the Nationalist Party to ‘disassociate’ itself from me, to speak out against me, to ‘condemn’ me. They can’t try to get the Nationalist Party to get rid of me, because unlike Thake and Mallia I am not a candidate or linked to the Nationalist Party in any way, despite the massive Labour-driven propaganda to the contrary.
Instead of examining the real reasons for the Labour-driven discord and resentment towards people like Thake and Mallia, individuals within the Nationalist Party and hard-core supporters see a dove-tailing of their personal preferences and interests with those of Labour. And so they – idiotically, crazily – join forces with Labour’s interests to serve their own narrow ones. Esprit de corps? Give them a dictionary so that they can look it up. Everywhere they go they are met with angry people who tell them they shouldn’t have taken Thake off the radio, but the voices and demands of those angry Nationalist supporters are brushed off. Then they listen instead to the anger of Laburisti who tell them to get rid of Salvu Mallia. Get rid of him? They’re lucky to have him. Whether they will still be lucky to have him three years down the line is, at this point, totally irrelevant. They need him now – and if actual Nationalist politicians had any sense, they would begin speaking as he does, minus the blue language.
The Nationalist hard-core need to understand that all the reasons they don't like him are the very reasons that others do, and that they are not going to win a general election on the hard-core vote alone. The so-called values, attitudes and mind-set of the Nationalist hard-core are among the many key reasons why all other support has fled. Confronted with those attitudes, and those sorts of people, I want to flee too. But I don’t, because it would be more irresponsible now than it would have been in 2013. Those values, attitudes are mind-set are literally intolerable and completely alien to people like me, and I'm 52. Just imagine how much more intolerable and alien they are to people who are 22 or 32. In fact, I know just how intolerable they are because I have quite considerable access to that age cohort.
I am capable of blanking out all those backwoods billies and village attitudes and narrow minds and concentrating on what really matters: policies, trustworthiness, reliability and basic common decency. But not many people are willing to do that, even if they are able to.
I can't ever envisage any Nationalist Party leader with a roadmap for massive corruption, in league with a set of accountants to set up secret companies in Panama for himself, his chief of staff and his 'chosen' cabinet minister just days after coming to power, then pressing on with the corruption even when they're caught. Say what you like, run the Nationalists down as much as you do, but I'll bet even you can't envisage that. They’re just not the type. And it’s a political party, not a criminal outfit. Its structures are such as to prevent any kind of hijacking as we have seen with Labour. Its natural supporters are also more savage in their scrutiny, which makes it all the more strange, weird that so many thousands of them failed to scrutinise Joseph Muscat and his cronies and wound up voting for them in 2013.
You'll probably say that you didn't envisage it with Muscat, either. But I did, and I wrote about it - not because I am brilliantly insightful or remarkably prescient, but because if you were watching closely, looking at all those devils in the detail, it really wasn't too difficult to work out. Many of my website's and this newspaper’s readers had worked it out. So all right – I had a professional advantage because it’s been my job since 1990 to scrutinise politicians and write about them for a newspaper column once and then twice a week. But really, it wasn’t that difficult. Muscat had ‘crook’ stamped on his forehead.
The trouble with the Nationalist hard-core who are currently objecting to Salvu Mallia all over Facebook is two-fold: they don't know when their pot is being stirred by the Labour Party, and they want the Nationalist Party of 30 years ago, which is gone for good just like the era it served (and thank God for that).
Malta has changed. Society has changed. Attitudes have changed. The Nationalist hard-core should examine why it took an old man with a ball-breaking attitude to get young people talking about politics and politicians. Salvu Mallia has even captured the imagination of LovinMalta – quite a feat for somebody aged 60+ who’s a (shudder) party candidate.
Right now, Mallia is stealing Labour's show. He got blanket coverage in the news yesterday – it was wall to wall Salvu and that dachshund, another great touch - , on what was supposed to be Owen Bonnici's big press conference day. Nobody bothered with Mr Janice Bartolo and his whining. He was totally eclipsed. Everybody was filming, photographing, reporting and reading about Mallia, who was far more interesting.
He has the self-assurance to do it. Without that self-assurance, you couldn't pull it off. And he's at an age and stage in life where if you have any sense at all, you don't give a damn about the rubbish, having worked out what matters. When you're counting down the years, you have to be pretty dumb to waste them worrying what people think about you. It’s not like anybody is going to be lying on their death-bed thinking, “Damn, they called me crazy. That is so awkward.”
Mallia has clearly thought about it: the image that might come across as haphazard and totally off-beat is actually, I would say, pretty carefully curated.
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