Do we really believe the country gets the leaders it deserves? It increasingly looks like the country is NOT getting the leaders it deserves. All it seems to get are alley cats going for each other’s jugular and keeping everyone awake with their caterwauling.
It has already been said, at least by the present government, that it would much prefer not to hold the local council elections every year since these tend to become mini general elections and disrupt the whole country. But then its own leaders contradict their own statements and plunge into electioneering in a big way.
Inevitably, hype creates counter-hype and no one is the real winner.
This week we had the shameful episode that took place at the PN club in San Gwann when the One News crew decided to take a leaf out of Striscia la Notizia and ask Prime Minister Gonzi some confrontational questions. It already says a lot that the media owned by the Left models itself on the television stations owned by the Centre-Right in Italy (sans veline, unfortunately).
But PN secretary general Joe Saliba was very wrong to react, as were the other PN officials, especially when they knew that everything was being recorded for posterity. It is the reaction of the intended victim that makes Striscia la Notizia so successful.
Maltese politics is far too sombre, as if defeat is unthinkable and the beginning of the end; there is far too much seriousness and far too little humour.
It is inevitable that when the two main parties have come to so resemble each other in their centrist policies, they seek other ways to differentiate themselves, mostly through positing opposing personalities or through insisting ‘this lot’ is better/worse than ‘that lot’.
By immersing himself totally in the electoral tussle, Labour leader Alfred Sant has found himself being drawn into the minutiae of local politics, from totting up the percentage of success of each locality, which mysteriously always comes to the 90 per cent levels wherever a Labour locality is concerned but around pass mark if it is PN-led.
Yesterday, he walked in the mud to show where a bus shelter has been dumped and how it is being used as a makeshift breeding house. Again, another Striscia la Notizia well-worn tactic.
And all this is in aid of, at the very most, keeping one locality, Rabat, in the Labour fold. Consider the onslaught on Tony Abela. First, on what may not have been a Labour-inspired barb, on Dr Abela’s (former) business associates, and later, when that did not stick, by entrapping him in what could look like he was infringing the code of ethics by carrying on with his private practice – certainly, if that was the case, it would not the only one in this or any other government.
Is this the way politics should be played?
The drip by drip leaking of a PN internal report on the 2004 electoral defeat, if indeed this has not been doctored or cut, could have its own validity but only if the Nationalist Party were to discuss it with openness and loyalty. The way it has been subbed on l-orizzont, however, makes for confusing reading as one rarely knows if one is reading from the real text or from l-orizzont’s interpretation of it.
On the government side, things are hardly better. Take the welcome news of $300 million investment, the creation of 5,600 jobs, for example. Any other government would have announced it “in tempi non sospetti” and avoided building the whole campaign around it. Here, it has become the keystone of the whole campaign, which is why it immediately became suspect in many people’s eyes, even if, at least as this newspaper sees it, it is solid, real and promising, well, certainly more than Gama. The government has fallen foul of its own spinning mania.
Dr Sant is probably chewing his bedroom slippers thinking that there he was focusing on painting the rails in Bugibba when he could have gone and got this kind of investment.
As an AD candidate writes in today’s issue, most people are concerned only with local or personal issues. MLP has decided to go the whole hog, as witness Dr Sant’s commitment yesterday to Sliema voters that a Labour government will block the Qui-si-Sana parking project. The Nationalist Party has not followed down this particular street so far, even though this may play mayhem with its results.
But then it also refuses to widen its appeal, as evidenced by today’s interview with the Prime Minister, and seems to prefer to go down without bending or any sort or compromise with the new Malta which, the heads and authorities willing or unwilling, is already there.
We are between a rock and a hard place, or, to be clearer, between one hard head and another hard head. They keep knocking and banging each other about in a ritual annual dance, maximising their arguments, minimising the other side, eyeballs bulging, straining to get a couple of thousand more votes here or there, ratcheting up the political temperature and, meanwhile, the Maltese, fed up with these antics, are becoming more and more sceptical of anything that resembles politics.
The leaders – both sets of them – have only themselves to blame. Whoever wins, will find a wasteland of their own doing.