Eleven years after the last change in administration, Malta has been mired in a crisis of governance. The conduct of many politicians, public officials, and government institutions was so pervasively marked by corruption as to more closely resemble criminal activity than democratic governance. The most damaging dimensions of that crisis were that corruption fuelled and rewarded Malta's unorthodox brand of politics at the expense of the general populace, and the impunity enjoyed by those responsible for these abuses both denied justice to its victims and obstructed reform.
There were a few signs that the government was willing to consider real reform of Malta's failed institutions, with the prime minister himself making a rhetorical commitment to upholding the rule of law. Such statements are welcome and important. But so long as government officials and other powerful individuals are able to throw their efforts into attempting the illegal subversion of those same institutions with impunity, no amount of legislative tinkering will preserve their integrity. Only determined action to reform key institutions and tackle impunity will achieve meaningful change in governance and respect for human rights.
Most of what we know about corruption comes from instances in which misdeeds become public, usually generating a scandal. Corruption scandals have shaken politics on this island. Not that we were ever a golden example when it comes to clean politics, but we are now seeing the stability of our political sphere threatened by the disclosure of misdeeds.
Corruption is today a structural phenomenon, as corruption scandals emerge at specific points in time, indicating that there must be multiple corrupt acts that never become public. Then, what explains why some corrupt acts turn into scandals while others remain in the dark without society ever finding out? The role of the media and of horizontal or societal accountability mechanisms, together with the press, can never be emphasised enough in having corrupt acts that were previously concealed now made public. A reasonable deduction from all this is that more scandals simply arise from more corruption. Hence, the emergence of more corruption scandals would indicate growing levels of corruption.
For each of the political scandals that we have had throughout these last eleven years, we always assisted in a three-tier unfolding of the scandal. First, there was the trigger stage, when information on the transgression is leaked, followed by the spread stage, when the information is made public to a wider audience, and the response stage, when those involved in the scandal react. The duration and intensity of each stage varied from scandal to scandal.
What came after the very first leaked political scandal quickly turned into something much greater, uncovering a vast and intricate web of political and corporate racketeering. In eleven years, we had close to two hundred political scandals, among which were the assassination of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, scandals associated with former Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, and the more recent deals involving PM Robert Abela.
Maltese politics is awash with scandals. They have become like prarie fires: easy to flare, difficult to control, and hard to stop once started. This state of the nation is indicative of wider corruption issues. Yet, all officials, politicians, and the political party at the centre of corruption allegations continue to enjoy favourable standing with the vast majority of the electorate.
What are we to make of this? Have we come to accept a degree of corruption as part of the price we pay for representative democracy? Is administrative competence more important to us than incorruptibility? Or is corruption, like much more in Maltese politics, an entirely partisan issue? As long as "our side" is implementing the policies "we" like, what’s a little corruption between ideological allies? Or is there something more dire going on? Has political corruption become so normalised that it has infiltrated the body politic?
What a mess Maltese domestic politics has become! Some have gone as far as to label Malta a ‘mafia state’. The national interest and the interests of organised crime are now inextricably intertwined, and many individuals, mega companies, and other institutions have become synonymous with ill-gotten gains, nepotism, and money laundering.
There are, of course, responsible politicians concerned about the public good in Malta too. The danger highlighted by the latest scandals is that the very mechanisms of representative democracy may lose credibility. Is electoral democracy meaningful without the rule of law?
Come the next general election, voters will have to make a choice between Malta as an EU member state or as the kind of ‘mafia state’ described by some. I hope that the two notions are mutually exclusive. After all, the rule of law is the very basis of trust among the member states. Nevertheless, almost two decades after a few reforms and modernizations after joining the European Union, clientelism and crony capitalism are still rife in Malta, as highlighted by the latest scandalous revelations.