Shame on you!!

Shame on you!!

When I heard the MCAST ‘students’ chant that at Prime Minister Gonzi, something kept tugging at my memory.

It was only later that I remembered where I had heard it before.

Of course, it was the chant a group of hotel housemaids sang to a dishevelled Dominique Strauss Kahn as he was being rushed to the New York courts after his encounter with the hotel housemaid.

Someone inside the PL core must have taken note of that and kept it to use in the campaign. Well, he, or she, or they, made a huge strategic mistake.

For up till then Joseph Muscat had been building the PL campaign on the ‘Malta taghna lkoll’ litany and on repeated assertions there is no division between us.

I don’t particularly like Dr Muscat’s rhetorical flights and see them as very hackneyed. Besides, it is clear he is speaking from a prepared text that he has not written.

But still, in the preceding weeks he had instilled a reconciliation theme into his speeches that the idiots at MCAST then tore apart.

That was not spontaneous: it was planned and choreographed. Someone wanted to turn the debate into a chanting match of vituperation against the Prime Minister. That someone might say this was sweet revenge for the ‘welcome’ that greeted Alfred Sant at university five years ago. But there is this big difference: that while PN boorishness angered PL supporters five years ago, PL boorishness now plays right into the hands of the PN and resurrects fears of the PL rent-a-mob that went to university not so many years ago and beat up the students. Ask Michael Frendo about that!

So all of a sudden all the PL strategy of moving towards the centre was swept away by a few young people. It is obvious that people in the middle and possible switchers realize that the real face of Labour will only become evident after an election victory, not before.

Nevertheless, the PN somehow did not take it up. Instead, they have been focusing on matters that I do not really see as relevant, such as phone entrapments of Tony Zarb, and all this thing about Joe Cordina (about which, more later).

There are now signs they are coming up with their A-bomb: what do some people know about Joe Muscat that they have such a grip on him?

I must warn I believe this is an absolutely wrong card to play. This campaign has already degenerated well beyond previous ones. To get private lives involved (or involved more than they are now) brings us to the cliff-edge.

I really do not know what levels of despair have pushed people so far.

All parties have their own internal problems about what goes on inside their clubs. The purported recording of Toni Abela is damaging but which party can say its officials do not go for damage control on events inside the clubs?

True, the pole dancers in the Mosta PN club were reported to the police who found nothing, though they found evidence of drug abuse.

There is nothing linear about this election campaign: parties begin on one track then get diverted into side issues and then into more side issues. It has been an overlong campaign and people are now just giving up on understanding what is going on and the more the parties keep insisting on Tonio Fenech and his ‘tal-lira’ clock, the more things get Byzantine and incomprehensible.

And, from what I hear, the percentage of people who have not made up their minds is now greater than it was at this point five years ago. So people need explanations, not more twists and turns that turn them giddy. Sometimes even we hardened journalists tell each other to remember the exact contours of some issue. The main issues are being left by the wayside while the parties bicker on trivia.

The oil procurement issue is definitely not trivia. It has come up right in the middle of the campaign and while the issue is sub judice and in the courts of law, the impact has been considerable.

For a time it seemed it came up almost as a corollary of the PL’s proposals on energy (though I really cannot see the connection: even if there was all the corruption imaginable in oil procurement, are we really to believe the country made the HFO choice because of this corruption and not technical for financial reasons?)

Going by the arraignments only, I cannot accept Austin Gatt’s justification that when one appoints somebody one cannot really be held responsible for what that person does. Then why did Dr Gatt remove both Tancred Tabone and Frank Sammut? The present police investigation should have begun much earlier.

The PN’s riposte by pointing at Joe Cordina raises many issues. Above all, people in the financial sector who spoke to me were aghast that the PN would make such a move, since this could give a very bad image of our financial services abroad, and worse it is the party in government which is raising a corner of what goes on and undermining fiduciary institutions.

The inner story of Mr Cordina and his fellow directors being attacked in legal papers by fellow PL candidates is ironic but then, when Tonio Fenech tried to put across this point in his press conference on Friday, all the journalists seemed interested to ask him was about that dratted ‘tal-lira’ clock.

The trivia wins over the serious matter.

The Commission’s quite handsome bill of health on the Maltese economy while the rest of Europe is sinking went practically unnoticed even, it would seem, by the PN itself.

The PN, I hold, has still to come clean with its supporters and express regret it has not lived up to their expectations. Instead, all it seems to do is to boast. The coming days may see a spate of inaugurations, beginning today. All the more reason for disenchanted people to turn away.

Every election everywhere has its own dose of charges of sleaze – look at Italy. So either one takes it as natural that charges of sleaze will be made at election time, or else the parties that go that way have lost sight of what their electoral programmes are meant to say.

I would have thought that, in Italy as well as in Malta, parties would look at what is irking people and show them the way forward. It seems, unhappily, this is not the case, and not just here.

People are ready to run after mirages, after snake charmers, people are ready to applaud anyone who makes populist promises.

We, then, have it much worse. I have just been to get my voting document. It’s a joke. We were three in the queue and none of us live in that locality any more. You can go and register your address as 1, Republic Street, Valletta and that is where your ID will say you live.

Another joke is the people coming from abroad to vote without anybody really checking to see whether they satisfy the residence requirement.

And judging by the comments one hears, reads on the social media, etc, many people care just about themselves and nobody else. Not the country where they live, nor about the future, nor about long term. In the long term, someone used to say, we’re all dead.

Our electoral system is skewed; we should have, like other countries, a national minimum benchmark, rather than challenging a timid third party into getting elected from one electoral district.

In most elections here, as in 2008, 700 votes gave the government to one party, which then proceeded to rule in an absolute manner, and took it away from the other. We say this system prevents instability but we have been unstable for the past five years. The fact that we sometimes get governments elected with enough surplus votes to have a stable majority deludes us into thinking we are not inherently unstable.

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