If Joseph Muscat isn’t careful, he’s going to end up hoist by his own petard after he wins the general election in 2013. He’s taken a leaf out of Alfred Sant’s book and is raising expectations about things that common sense tells us he cannot deliver.
But not everyone has common sense, and of those who do, a significant number are quite keen on giving an open interpretation to what has been said, and even imagining that things have been said when they haven’t, simply because it makes them feel better and gives them hope.
Over on the Internet comments-boards, they have even convinced themselves that when Muscat becomes prime minister, he will slice the salaries of Cabinet ministers and Members of Parliament back to what they were. Aside from the fact that this will make no difference to the price of bread, gas or electricity, no government can renege on a salary agreement, and even if the incoming prime minister were somehow able to do so, he wouldn’t because it would mean slashing the income of his own people, with the resulting revolution among the troops. But even so, what is interesting is the fact that Joseph Muscat never said or even implied that he will do away with the salary increases. He is merely fomenting discord and encouraging resentment about them, and people have completed the sentence in their own minds, completely without foundation: “If he is against the salary increases, then he will end them.”
Such credulity is the result of hysterical thinking, but even credulous and hysterical people have a vote and it doesn’t take much to put the choice of the credulous and hysterical in government, as we shall soon see.
The thing is that in 1996 Alfred Sant needed to promise what he couldn’t deliver because the government was on a roll. People were comfortable enough to feel they could afford to try him out, but still he needed that Big Something Extra to swing him into power. And so he promised the undeliverable: that he would get rid of VAT.
What he didn’t say was that he would replace it with something truly dreadful and unworkable, and even more of a burden, called CET. His finance minister resigned, people stopped boasting that they had voted for him (that was fun to watch) and after 22 months his government collapsed. The same people who rushed to vote him in then rushed back to vote him out while denying that they had ever voted for him in the first place, and God help anyone who reminded them that they had boasted about it in the immediate aftermath of electoral success.
But Joseph Muscat doesn’t need to do the same. He doesn’t need to prod and coax people into thinking that when he becomes prime minister, families of five or six people will be able to live well on a single working man’s wage and even go on holiday. He doesn’t need to give them the impression (while not actually saying so) that he will slash the price of electricity, gas and diesel. He doesn’t need to do any of that because the government is too busy losing the election with those ghastly backbenchers trying their damnedest to sink the ship they’re sailing on, and with its inability to manage public perception.
Those backbenchers – and one EU Commissioner who had better concern himself with EU diaries and Christmas Day instead of constantly licking his wounds like a sore rat on Super One – like to make out that the Prime Minister is the problem. How wrong they are. If Lawrence Gonzi is the problem, then how do they account for the fact that every time he speaks in debates, he beats his opponents and convinces a sizeable part of his audience? He is invariably calm, rational, measured, logical and well prepared. His opposite number ends up reduced to cockiness and thinly veiled personal insults.
So no – they, those backbenchers, are the problem, and they are so far up themselves that they can’t even see it. Because they think they deserve more attention and importance than they are given, the boss who isn’t giving them the attention and importance they believe to be theirs by right is the one whose head should roll. Really, it’s incredible.
John Dalli isn’t even too embarrassed to admit this on their behalf. Here he is again, griping in the newspapers because people don’t think that the Nationalist Party is their home any more. They feel left out. They don’t recognise it for what it was and for how it developed. Well, thank God for that. If the Nationalist Party were still what it was back in the day, then I for one wouldn’t be voting for it, just as nobody in either my maternal or paternal families did, and for the same reasons. People like Jean Pierre Farrugia, John Dalli, Jesmond Mugliett and Robert Arrigo and others I would rather not mention fail to understand that they are part of what makes the Nationalist Party unattractive to people like me. They actually believe they are the main draw.
Who are these people who don’t feel at home in the Nationalist Party? Electors don’t vote for a party because they feel at home in it, or because they can go in and out of party HQ and be recognised and smiled at and go in and out of doors and stuff things in envelopes and stop by the leader’s office for a nice chat and to tell him how to do his job while calling the various messengers by their nicknames. The individuals who feel this way are in the minority, and they include our awful, griping EU Commissioner and his coterie of resentful backbenchers.
They don’t understand that the world has changed and that the structure and organisation of political parties has changed with it. They are living and breathing in a bygone age. Yes, but with one crucial ingredient of that bygone age conspicuously absent: irgulija, which has no accurate equivalent in English because gentlemanliness doesn’t quite cut it.
Commissioner Dalli’s behaviour is so far removed from irgulija and gentlemanliness that he is, unfortunately, a glaring illustration of the biting truism that, inevitably, breeding will out. The man hasn’t any. His behaviour is disgraceful. One can understand and brush off an initial bitter reaction in the immediate aftermath of disappointment, but constant whinging and griping and public displays of self-pity are, for want of a better expression, so very tacky. He feels encouraged by the support he gets from the common man, failing to understand that the common man relates to it precisely because it is so very common, and by that, I don’t mean ‘frequently occurring’. He should know that something much more, and better, is expected of him in his exalted position – a position he petitioned for, was given, and then proceeded to describe as a prison sentence.
Meanwhile, Dr Farrugia, in his rude, impulsive, ill-conceived and badly written e-mail to his party colleagues, claimed to model himself on Ugo Mifsud Bonnici. What an embarrassment for him, and what an irritation for Dr Mifsud Bonnici, a gracious gentleman of the old school, both in politics and in daily life. If Jean Pierre Farrugia truly believes that the former president is the sort of man (or was the sort of politician) who would vent his frustration in a rude, disloyal, abrasive and, above all, poorly written and ungrammatical round-robin e-mail, telling the recipients to leak it if they wish because he doesn’t care either way, then he really has no insight at all. Ugo Mifsud Bonnici is a gentleman, was a consummate politician and, above all, constructs elegant and eloquent sentences devoid of multiple exclamation marks.
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