The PL manifesto launched last week was a game changer in itself. Not only was it well received by various strata of civil society and major stakeholders but its 837 proposals spread over 20 chapters showed a deep sense of commitment and a high level of preparedness.
The fact that the PL leader also made the quantum leap of even singling out as of now his Deputy Leader and would be Deputy Prime Minister Louis Grech to be responsible for the task of co-coordinating its implementation showed that the PL meant business and that it had every intention of ensuring that its electoral programme will be implemented rather than taking people for a ride the way GonziPN have done. Neither does it intend to see its concrete proposals turn into a dead letter as time goes by.
The programme stunned many people on the basis of its well thought out contents, a set of proposals that led to a senior ex Nationalist Minister to define it as an impressive electoral programme.
From the reaction that I had from some gullible voters who expected us to try and match the PN’s attitude of promising everything to everyone even at the risk of sacrificing sustainability, I could tell that Joseph Muscat really meant it when he stated that Labour is only making realistic pledges that it knows that it can implement.
A priori we were determined to ensure that our plans would be feasible without being overly optimistic.
This overall approach which goes way beyond the mere contents of the electoral programme is a game changer in itself.
The same way that it made sense for the PL to launch a set of proposals daily before launching the electoral programme in toto formally. Something which if not handled differently would have run the risk of overwhelming voters without giving them enough time and opportunity to digest the whole set of proposals. Particularly when all this comes at a time when the electorate at large is presently suffering from a rather strange and eerie feeling – a bizarre combination of electoral anxiety and electoral fatigue.
The best way to define a game changer is someone who manages to change the way that something is done, thought about or made.
A game changer has new and different ideas that stand out from the crowd. An idea that completely changes the way a situation develops. A visionary strategist that uses creative innovation by way of conceiving an entirely new plan and strategy on the way forward. There are two ways to achieve such an ambitious objective. The same applies to politics.
Either by way of a positive approach, built on forward thinking grounded in common sense or else through sheer negativity and the employment of the dirty tricks department.
The way the election campaign has unfolded so far has evidently shown that the PL has been a game changer all along, in the positive sense of the word, while the only card that the incumbent GonziPN seem to have to make up for their lack luster campaign is two fold – that of demonizing anyone who by any stretch of the imagination can be perceived as lending the PL a helping hand in this campaign or even worse by trying to target individual members of the PL team in the hope of derailing the successful and positive way forward that the PL has long adopted, way before the campaign proper found itself officially underway.
While the PL welcomed as it had promised to do – even before it took place – the recent EU summit outcome, all this seems to have been eclipsed by the story that surfaced only hours after the Presidential Pardon had been approved regarding oil sector kick back allegations. The least that Joseph Muscat could have done is to do as he did – to demand that the Prime Minister should come up with some explanations after the Sunday Times revelations. The hysterical reaction of GonziPN, which chose to attack Muscat for doing so rather than to own up and give the official version from the Government side, said much about the way this revelation seems to have unsettled GonziPN. After all it was not Joseph Muscat who broke the story but a local newspaper without any ties to the PL. Government had reacted the same way when another Sunday newspaper had first provided smoking gun evidence about these serious allegations.
What I personally found perplexing and worrying indeed is that regardless of how true or not the statements made in the disclosed emails may be, a person singled out by initials – and I am sure that any self respecting person will not even dare claim that they might have had the Attorney General in mind when coming up with such initials (AG), to me it seems to be none other than the same Minister who had told me in Parliament that there was no conflict of interest when allegations had been made about the then outgoing MOBC CEO and his alleged links with a private company in direct competition with the government entity he ran. Suspicions are inclined to run deeper when one bears in mind that in spite of Minister Gatt’s repeated claims in the House that contrary to what was being implied there was no conflict of interest on the ex CEO’s part, recently the Prime Minister admitted in another section of the local press that yes, the CEO had had his post abolished because of strong whiffs of conflict of interest. Many months after I had hinted so much myself by quoting from a leading bunkering journal an article that put in a bad light our standing as a country in the bunkering trade.
The fact that the PM felt compelled to go for a presidential pardon can be given various interpretations. Some arguably based on sheer speculations.
If Cabinet had turned down the Pardon request the PM would have been accused of again going back on his word and the PM would have faced the risk of uninvolved members of Cabinet publicly distancing themselves from the decision to get brownie points in the post GonziPN era.
The most likely option is that Dr Gonzi simply had no choice. Bearing in mind that the Police were initially against such a presidential pardon, something must have led to a change of mind at the highest level. One cannot exclude that the PM may believe that by pinning all the blame on appointees and business people, the PN would come out clean and be seen as honest and upright.
This might have made sense had one not kept in mind that the PL – yours truly included – had been long clamoring for an in depth NAO report about how oil trading and procurement took place in Malta and secondly that the PL has been pointing out the need for investigations since years ago – which GonziPN chose to ignore.
No matter how much credit GonziPN might claim, the whole scandal came to light thanks to an investigative local Sunday newspaper and not Government itself. Otherwise most probably the whole murky saga would have remained buried in the sand.
By playing the martyr, Gonzi may hope to replay a repetition of the JPO Mistra saga of 2008.
In conclusion whichever way the last crucial and delicate stages of the campaign will go – and they can only go downhill with a leading blogger attacking politicians for purely health reasons – the electorate will be realizing perhaps more than ever why:
GonziPN has not only not done anything over these years, but even shirked from doing so in his party’s manifesto about: The whistleblower’s act, Party financing and the removal of time barring when it came to any potential criminal action against the highest members of the political class, ministers included.
Recently there has been much anger in Spain about political corruption. But the feeling that many Spaniards experienced last week when they awoke to the news that the ruling People’s Party could be involved in yet another spectacular corruption case could rightly or wrongly apply to Malta. That it is possible to be shocked without being surprised.