I watched, for some time, last Tuesday’s PN mass meeting on NET.
The photos in the newspapers next day all showed the crowd from the rostrum, but some of the shots that NET was showing were from the back of the crowd and were quite revealing.
For while the photos from the rostrum showed an enthusiastic crowd and smiling faces just like at a rock concert, those from the back showed a crowd that was not really interested in what Lawrence Gonzi was saying. There were young people with crested hair chatting to each other and others exhibiting all signs of boredom. Why they were actually there, I could not fathom.
All I could see was Lawrence Gonzi really struggling to make his points. He kept glancing at his notes, which as all know is the worst thing to do when facing a restive audience.
This thing about chatting while a speech is going on has become a national malady. Last week too, at the Chinese National Day celebration both the Chinese Ambassador and the President spoke to a wall of chattering people, some high ups included, who patently did not give a toss about what was being said.
Having said that, I think that Dr Gonzi has some serious issues with anger management.
It may be a politician’s curse to let rip when facing an audience that laps up such things. This can help explain why Austin Gatt reverted to appearing as a każin bar room bragger when he boasted that PN would be in power for the next 20 years.
When Dr Gonzi finds himself facing an audience, his anger is there. He has taken to attack Labour as if this was the last mass meeting before the election, instead of a year and a half before it.
There is no humour, no softness, in Dr Gonzi’s words. He and his government are right all the time, were right all the time, will be right all the time. Those who doubt this are just like Labour – losers.
And yet, on that big wide Fosos, there was a huge elephant everyone kept tiptoeing round – the divorce campaign in which the people with their humble vote showed they did not buy Dr Gonzi’s medicine. In all Dr Gonzi’s list of achievements, there was no reference to when the people went one way and Dr Gonzi went another. All this just a week before people begin to use their newly-acquired right: it’s OK for the Libyans to enjoy their new freedom, but what about us?
A careful look, possibly with the sound off, at the faces around Dr Gonzi belied the impression he was trying to give. This is where anger management is essential. The faces were glum, grim even. (I want to add a note regarding Kate Gonzi. Her husband takes to having her around, far more than Eddie used to have the late lamented Mary with him at such political events. And Kate is looking tired and disappointed, possibly just tired and stressed, like trying very hard to cope but not really managing the stressful life her husband lives).
There was thus a dichotomy, a dissonance, between the message that Dr Gonzi was bravely trying to put across to a restive audience – that things are looking better, that Malta is an exception in Europe, that the government was very able to manage the Libya crisis, that the Opposition are just grumblers – which was all a positive message but then the anger, the aggressiveness, the ‘I was right’ leitmotif showed an underlying fragility.
This, in other words, was just a make-believe that lasted the time it lasted. As Dr Gatt’s braggart act looked flat by the next morning, so Dr Gonzi’s crafted speech did not excite spirits. It ended up as the sort of speech we have come to experience every 20 September, year in, year out. With Dr Gonzi, as with President Abela and Joe Muscat, one mourns the passing of political oratory, the Dom Mintoff enormous crowds listened to for hours in the rain without as much as a whispered remark permitted.
To unite the two speakers again, neither Dr Gatt who a stone’s throw away had made his fatal “bużullotti” speech on 2 July, and who has so far not taken an Arriva ride, nor Dr Gonzi (who ditto), mentioned Arriva. Another big elephant in the square.
To be fair, there are all the reasons in the world for the man at the top to start feeling everyone is out to get him. I am reading Tony Blair’s book, and he describes this situation very well when, after months and years of hard work, trying to get things right, having to choose all the time, sometimes having to climb back after some self-inflicted mistakes, especially when the media is out to get you, and when it all seems a conspiracy out to undermine, when the Opposition is not given the same treatment, nor what it says is truly examined, when the country all but seems determined to have a change, when there’s nothing one can do to revert the current image…
In his speech, Dr Gonzi made three main points: Air Malta (where he announced the beginning of the corrective exercise. I have been given some insight and am now more confident the airline can be redirected, although a lot must be done); Libya (another opportunity for Dr Gonzi to point at the difference with Labour, not Mintoff’s Labour, but also Joe Muscat’s Labour) and the economy.
The way he spoke about economic matters is highly significant. He spoke of Malta doing well in the recession and doing even better ‘after the storm is over’.
Dear dear Dr Gonzi, the storm is not over. It is just about to be unleashed. The biggest tsunami in recent world history, far bigger than the Lehman Brothers debacle three years ago. It is clear that neither Dr Gonzi, nor Tonio Fenech (for otherwise he would not have spoken of asking Greece for a collateral, as he told The Times) have any idea what’s coming.
I am quoting from what Bloomberg said yesterday here: “History’s first sovereign default came in the 4th century BC, committed by 10 Greek municipalities. There was one creditor: the temple of Delos, Apollo’s mythical birthplace.
“Twenty-four centuries later, Greece is at the edge of the biggest sovereign default and policy makers are worried about global shock waves of an insolvency by a government with 353 billion euros ($483 billion) of debt − five times the size of Argentina’s $95 billion default in 2001.”
“There is a monstrously large amount of uncertainty and a massive range of possibilities,” said David Mackie, chief European economist at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in London. “A macroeconomic disaster could be averted but only by aggressive policy action by central banks and governments,” he said.
The Greek default is not a possibility any more; it is practically a certainty. Greek two-year yields surged above 70 per cent yesterday and credit-insurance prices on Greece indicate the chance of default at more than 90 per cent.
Tonio Fenech resisting them on the beaches with the collateral weapon is like fighting World War II with WW 1 weapons. The crisis has moved on and it’s now endgame. This is a family paper and I would not want to disrupt people’s stomachs so early in the day. For those who want to punish themselves, this is the link to Bloomberg: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-22/greece-on-edge-of-biggest-insolvency-24-centuries-after-first-city-default.html
The next election, whenever it comes, will be played in the shadow of what’s about to hit us. It is equally indicative that when Mr Fenech told The Times (we had been asking much the same thing for weeks but got nothing more than a promise they would come back to us with more substance later on) that some time ago Malta made a stand on a collateral, he let slip that Malta will be guaranteeing €400 million as its share in the EFSF facility created at the July summit. It’s buried down there in the article; you could miss it.
No Parliament in the eurozone has so far ratified that agreement and some will not be doing so till later this year or even the beginning of the next. Dr Gonzi earlier played with the idea of convening Parliament ahead of its scheduled meeting after the summer recess on 3 October, but there’s no hint of that yet. Just as others are doing, maybe we ought to wait and see what will happen before we hurry to commit funds to a Greece that is unwilling to rescue itself from its own self-inflicted problems.
Dr Gonzi had better bury his anger, focus on the matter, get proper advice (which he does not look like having) and open bridges to the Opposition. The coming tsunami will need all hands on deck. The Opposition had better understand what’s happening instead of pinpricking on the minutiae and the figures and missing out once again on the big picture. The Europe after the coming perfect storm, if there will still be a Europe after all, will be a vastly changed place and we need to be nimble and stave off the worst.
Last Tuesday, I switched off NET and Gonzi on the Fosos and watched Ballarò on RAI. I learned then that Moody’s reason for downgrading Malta’s foreign-currency and local-currency government bond ratings to A2 from A1 and revising the outlook to negative was not much different from the reasons given by Standard & Poor’s to downgrade Italy.
One of the key reasons for this decision, Moody’s downgrade of Malta said, was lower medium-term economic growth rates. This was driven by a decline in potential output growth as a result of the 2008-09 financial crisis, thereby leaving the economy more vulnerable to further economic shocks.
Secondly, “the country has exhibited weak debt metrics for some time and the anticipated improvement in the government’s balance sheet at the time of EMU accession has not materialised”.
A third reason was the expectation that, even if debt ratios stabilised in the coming years, they were likely to remain above levels commensurate with an A1 rating over the medium-term.
In other words, both Malta and Italy had tried to convince themselves that their figures would look good by year-end, but they failed to factor in the deteriorating crisis. Dr Gonzi’s empty words on when the crisis is over show a man deep in self-deception.
[email protected]