I have only one brother, and he is eight years younger than I am. If you had to see us next to each other, you would not say that we have the same parents. There is no physical resemblance whatsoever.
The differences do not stop at the colour of our eyes and our complexion. Our characters and philosophy are like chalk and cheese. And the eight-year gap meant that we could never be close; just to put you in the picture, when I was in Sixth Form, he was still in primary school.
Now that he works in Bahrain, the distance between us – and not only from the geographical point of view – is even greater. The few times we meet we cannot carry on a conversation for more than two minutes, unless it’s about football. By the way, we support different teams too.
He was born just two days after Malta became a Republic in 1974. He was too young to remember the tough 1981-1987 years, a time during which I was constrained to leave St Aloysius College because of the government-Church dispute; a time when my Sixth Form days were characterised by the teachers’ nine-week strike and the presence of thugs outside and inside the school premises in Msida; a time when I gave up my dream of becoming a lawyer because the law course did not start every year. Thank God I had a second love – journalism.
Why am I saying this? Because those eight years made a world of difference in the opportunities we had. By the time my brother was 16, the university doors had been opened wide and the Institute of Tourism Studies, where he furthered his education, had been launched.
There is something else I want to tell you about my brother. He was, for a time, in the same class as Labour Party leader Joseph Muscat. Both will be nearly 40 when the next general election is held – Joseph has already told us that his ambition is to become Prime Minister at the age of 39.
Again, why am I saying this? Because in the next election, those under 40 – that is more or less one third of the electorate – will have practically lived all their adult life under a Nationalist administration, except for that tumultuous 22-month Labour stint between 1996 and 1998.
This is something that both parties cannot neglect when the time comes. One third of the electorate is a huge chunk of people, and they can sway the election one way or the other.
The way the two major parties tackle this situation will be a determining factor in the overall outcome.
For many years, the Nationalist Party used to refer to the violent years that preceded the 1987 election on a regular basis, and still do so when they have the chance, just as much as the older Labour Party exponents point out the difficult times they went through in the 1960s.
But, just as much as what happened during the Church-MLP dispute of the 1960s has little bearing on people my age because we did not live through them and cannot really grasp the real effect of having to get married in the sacristy – as many Labour supporters had to do in those years – what happened in the early 1980s doesn’t in any way touch the minds and hearts of the people who will be nearly 40 in 2013.
So it will be useless for the PN to continue harping on the pre-1987 times. It was, yes, the worst period for Malta since the Second World War, but it is long gone now. Those years are a world away and although a faction of the older generation might still worry that history could repeat itself – and any small incident is used by the PN media in an attempt to take us back in time to those years – too much water has passed under the bridge for these recollections to have an effect on the younger generation.
It is probably even useless for the PN to bring up the Sant years in the equation, knowing that a full 15 years would have passed since Alfred Sant was Prime Minister by the time we vote again. And anyway, Dr Sant is no longer party leader as he has been replaced by Joseph Muscat.
What we need is to look ahead, and not back. The battleground for the 2013 election should not be the past, but what both parties are proposing for the future.
scalleja@independent.com.mt
