Here’s some more free advice for the Labour Party during this campaign: when Lawrence Gonzi is on one channel, don’t put Alfred Sant on another at the same time. You are handing to people, on a plate, the opportunity to make odious comparisons. And they’ll make them, whether they want to or not. They won’t be able to help it, even if they are generally indifferent to politics and have ties to no particular party.
I can’t refer to Sant’s advisers, because it appears that he has none, preferring to rely instead on his own views, shored up by a couple of side-kicks like Jason tal-pjanti and egged on by the very much brighter Michael Falzon, my childhood contemporary and fellow neighbourhood kid. So instead I’ll assume that it was Sant himself who thought it would be a good idea to offer a competing distraction to Lawrence Gonzi’s interview on the highly civilised TVM show Dissett, last Tuesday night.
A party leader facing election should put himself in a position of direct comparison with his rival only when he is confident of his personal strengths. The strength of his party and its assumed success at the next election has absolutely nothing to do with it. When both party leaders are on television at the same time but on different channels, they are exposed to a comparison far more insidious and effective than when they are sitting side by side in a televised debate. This was particularly the case on Tuesday, when Sant was shown on Super One giving free reign to his public speaking skills at a Labour meeting, while Gonzi was shown on TVM sitting and having a grown-up chat with interviewer Reno Bugeja.
Sant may have achieved his aim of distracting many viewers from Gonzi on TVM. I was one of them, having settled down to watch Gonzi, but ending up morbidly fascinated by Sant’s performance on Super One - besides other aspects which I shan’t mention lest I end up sounding like BoobJob Jason. But did it work to Sant’s advantage? An educated guess is that the opposite is true. Though he succeeded in pulling viewers away from Gonzi, at the same time he exposed them to Gonzi’s alternative. He might as well have had a banner above his head proclaiming ‘vote for change and make me prime minister instead of that guy who’s on TVM right now’, to which the instinctive reaction would have been: “Not today, thanks/I’ll think about it and get back to you/I’ll pass on that, thanks very much.”
It’s a safe bet that most people who were watching Maltese television that night were, like me, switching between the two shows, and this would have reinforced Sant’s negative image against Gonzi’s positive one. You can tell me that I take this view because I am biased, but you would be wrong. I take it because I am a communicator, somebody who works in advertising and public relations, and there is no doubt at all that when Sant is given a microphone, a podium and a crowd, his serious weaknesses are exposed.
The same thing happens when he is put on the spot by journalists. He has chosen to deal with this problem by refusing to take impromptu questions from the media, or to be put in a situation where he is quizzed – though these are not options in a democratic country with a free press, when you are asking people to make you prime minister so that you can run the country and shape their lives.
It was unfortunate that I happened to switch over to Super One the very minute that Charles Mangion stopped speaking and the arrival of the leader was heralded by the waving of torca flags and chants of “Ghax ghandna l-Fredu maghna, ahna maghqudin – Viva l-Lejber, viva l-Lejber.”
It is a sight and sound that triggers a primordial, Pavlovian reaction in anyone who lived through the dark days of Dom Mintoff and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, and who didn’t support their outrageously violent and corrupt governments. In 2003, I kept in my car a recording of a crowd shouting “Ghax ghandna l-Fredu maghna, ahna maghqudin! Viva l-Lejber! Viva l-Lejber!”, and played it repeatedly while driving around. This kept me motivated as I joined the fight to make Malta a member of the European Union, a process which involved ensuring that Alfred Sant wasn’t elected. And thank heavens he wasn’t, because where would Malta be now?
Give Sant a microphone and he morphs into a marionette. Nothing he said on Tuesday night engaged me or caught my interest, largely because I was too busy examining various aspects of his appearance, which seem to be different every time he goes on television. There is a very good reason why he is failing to engage, that has nothing to do with his poor speaking skills: there is no fire in his belly. Last Tuesday, both he and his crowd were flat and half-hearted. You could sense that the crowd, even as they shouted “Ghax ghandna l-Fredu maghna’ were wondering: “What is this man still doing here?”
Opposition leaders who are facing a general election depend on fire in their belly to work up a frenzy of anger against the government among the electorate. Yet there is little or nothing to get angry about. It is true that boredom is dangerous. Boredom among the populace provoked a couple of countries into war in the first half of the 20th century, because wars distract people. But we’re not going to those lengths now.
Malta is nearing full employment. Public finances are greatly improved. There are jobs running after people rather than people running after jobs. Yes, householders are really annoyed at the water and electricity surcharge, but here’s the thing: they have the money to pay it. In households with two parents and three adult offspring, the likelihood is that everyone is working except the mother (and even this is changing). If a son or daughter isn’t working, it’s probably because he or she is in post-secondary education, and is receiving a stipend. Better still, people aren’t working only because they have to, but because they want to – because jobs are more interesting, because there are better choices. There have been great improvements in education, a new hospital, the introduction of the euro, which in general people are comfortable with and see the advantages of.
So how is Sant going to work us up into a frenzy of rage and dissatisfaction at the government? It’s difficult. As a professional communicator, I can see clearly that his problem is a serious one. I would have trouble handling it. I would probably spend weeks mulling over the quandary. He seems to have decided that it is by telling us how bored we are of the government. He overlooks the fact that boredom is not a strong motivating factor for swapping a good government for a bad one, unless it is among people who don’t think things through and who decide on the basis of emotion rather than rationality.
Even Sant’s accusations of corruption are sounding rather lame, with more flogging of Jesmond Mugliett’s dead horses and an embarrassing over-reliance on a couple of unstable characters who are being paraded around like a circus act. How different it all sounds to those towering rages against Il-Barunijiet in 1996, which really struck a chord with a disaffected populace. There’s another factor at play now which wasn’t there in 1996: Sant has already been a prime minister. We’ve seen rather a lot of him since then. We’ve seen his mistakes, his ineptitude. We’ve even suffered because of them, like when he froze Malta’s application to join the EU and threw the country into turmoil trying to come up with something to replace VAT, when he had promised people he would remove it, not replace it.
The bottom line is that Sant can’t go to the electorate and say: “Look here, vote for me because you’re bored of the government, even though they’re running the country pretty well, I’ve already been prime minister, and I was wrong about everything, especially joining Europe.” As a battle-cry, it doesn’t work. He hasn’t found another battle-cry though. His call for a New Beginning falls flat, because most intelligent people know that if you want a new beginning, you don’t get it using people from the governments of Dom Mintoff and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, and a failed prime minister from the past.
I am enthralled by the fact that the Labour Party is carefully avoiding all reference to the years when Sant was prime minister. This is part of presenting him as somebody new, rather than as a failed act from our past. Selling these people as a New Beginning depends on wiping out, in a Stalinist way, all references to the government of 1996 to 1998. You see, when you’re a communicator you notice these details. And you can point them out to others who don’t.
Even journalists are not being permitted to refer to Sant’s stint as prime minister. When one asked recently whether he still believes that ‘partnership’ is better than EU membership, Sant replied that he doesn’t discuss history. Yet history was sitting right there in his chair, demanding to be made prime minister again.