A few days ago, I wrote on my website that any Nationalist MP who isn’t prepared to get behind the party leader and fight hard, visibly and audibly, to win the general election is betraying the public. The reason for this is simple: people are thoroughly disgusted by the corruption of Muscat’s government (and that includes Labour supporters who are horrified at what is happening) but they can’t get rid of it. The only way to get rid of those corrupt people at the top, given that there is going to be no internal coup in the Labour Party itself, is for Muscat to lose the general election in a year’s time. And for Muscat to lose, Simon Busuttil has to win.
People are now desperate – the word is not used hyperbolically – for Labour to lose so that they can see the end of Konrad Mizzi, Keith Schembri and Joseph Muscat, of Owen Bonnici, Janice Bartolo and the whole raft of crooked underlings and their free-for-all, their companies in Panama and their suspect bank accounts. But they look at the people sitting on the Opposition benches in Parliament, at the Nationalist Party itself, and they see no particular drive to win. So the people who are angry at the Labour government are now also turning their anger on the Nationalist Party for not fighting hard enough to win the General Election, which means fighting Labour and also convincing people with their own plans and policies. What those people are saying to the Nationalist Party is: Please don’t let us down. We are relying on you to defeat Labour.
The Nationalist Party can argue that it is doing all it can, but the fact remains that the perception is otherwise, and precisely because people are now so sick of Labour, so anxious for the Nationalists to win, their expectations of what the Nationalist Party should be doing to achieve this objective are even higher than they would be under other circumstances.
There is a ‘life or death, all or nothing’ feeling about it. They are more than aware of how corruption will escalate and the situation will deteriorate if Muscat and his twisted cronies somehow get the electorate’s stamp of approval again next year, which will be taken as an open licence to plunder the store. By the end of that, Malta’s institutions, which have been reduced to shambles already, will be nothing but a false front used in the service of those cronies rather than of the public.
People need to see some fighting spirit, fury, rage, anger, determination. Where are all the voices of the various members of the Opposition, the individual candidates? They may be speaking or writing somewhere, but we are neither hearing them nor reading them, and that means their efforts are failing. Why has Salvu Mallia captured the public imagination, either for or against? It’s because he has hurled himself onto the stage and begun to yell out a single, easily digestible message: “This government is corrupt.” There is no confusion there. There are no mixed messages. It’s not a coincidence: Mallia is a seasoned broadcaster and beyond that has an innate understanding of audiences and how to communicate with them. He plays the fool and the eccentric but, in reality, he is neither of those things. He is sharp enough to know how to craft his image. “I am not a politician,” he said. That’s right: he’s a professional communicator, which is exactly what the Nationalist Party, which is stuffed full of politicians who don’t know how to communicate, needs right now.
The Nationalist Party’s decision to reverse its mad policy of banning all electoral candidates from hosting shows on its radio and television station has gone a considerable way towards heartening people and giving them some hope. The original decision, when it was taken, made people despair. They saw it as deliberate, inexplicable self-harm. Now the news that David Thake will be back on Radio 101, that Salvu Mallia and Claudette Buttigieg (both highly experienced television hosts in their pre-political life) might have their own shows on the party station, has cheered people up no end. Light glimmers at the end of a very dark tunnel. There is some hope.
The Labour politicians, candidates and party apparatchiks who are out in force sticking up for Mario de Marco, the Deputy Leader of the Nationalist Party, “against the witch”, are doing him no favours at all. Apart from the fact that there is no quarrel between de Marco and me, and never has been (he is not an extension of his father and sister, and I have never seen him that way; on a personal level I like him a lot), there is nothing to be gained for a party leader from the praise and support of the rival party. It just makes the supporters of his own party suspicious.
Mario de Marco’s father, Guido, had the same problem. Reading and listening to the Labour media sometimes gave you the impression that he was a Labour politician. They never targeted him, never criticised him, sometimes praised him, and always defended him if they perceived some criticism coming his way from others.
I always used to see this as extraordinary and very harmful to his political interests (though clearly not to other interests he may have had), and I am not happy to see the same thing happening to Mario, who doesn’t deserve it. No, he does not deserve to be tarred with the brush of Labour support and admiration, which is political poison. Supporters of the Nationalist Party are not going to be positively impressed when Labour politicians and Keith Schembri voice their support for the Deputy Leader of the Nationalist Party. No, they are going to raise a very sceptical eyebrow. And that, of course, is exactly why those Labour politicians and Keith Schembri are doing it. They are doing him harm and not good.
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