It is Eurovision weekend and a week before the first round of the election for deputy leaders of the Nationalist Party. By now, I’m used to fielding two kinds of questions.

There’s the one about what the song festival is like behind the scenes and if it’s really a big camp gay jamboree (yes, in case you were wondering as well) and then there’s the one with a darker side: isn’t my own personal trail from Eurovision contestant to PN deputy leader contender a step too far?

The choice of deputy leaders is for the PN councillors to make and I trust and accept their judgement. But I would like to answer the second question, because it’s not just about me: there’s a deeper anxiety behind it.

I have no regrets about participating in Eurovision. I loved it, I did it at the right time in my life, it’s given me beautiful memories and I learned a lot from it. In fact, no one’s suggesting there’s anything wrong with having done it. It’s the move from show business to serious politics that bothers some people. I understand the concern.

We live in a time when people have seen politics treated as though it is show business and simply about image. In certain countries, women have gone from being showgirls to ministers. Such things undermine the seriousness of politics and the fabric of democracy. 

Even in Malta, people are afraid that politics is becoming like Eurovision: all spectacle, image and lobbying, where it is often not substance and real singing quality that wins but promises and alliances made behind the scenes.

With JosephMuscat.com we have already embarked on that path. Remember all those poster boys and girls telling us they were in it for Malta? Every single one of them seems on course to being given a plum job. One could be forgiven for thinking they were in it for themselves.

There’s been worse. Not a week passes that a minister, or two, doesn’t show that they think the government is above any written code of behaviour or even – as the Health Minister’s dissolution of the Embryo Protection Authority indicates – the law.

The Foreign Minister, recently criticised in the media for breaking the ministerial code of ethics, has now taken on the media. He first tried a high-handed approach and told an inquiring journalist that he has no time for such questions. Now he has told Parliament that the media needs to curtail its urge to criticise.

Later he said he meant self-regulation. Isn’t that also what Mintoff meant when, in the 1970s, he urged Allied Newspapers not to incite ‘the people’?

Some people think it is shrill exaggeration to compare Muscat’s Labour with Mintoff’s. It depends on what you’re comparing: Mintoff wielded a big stick, Muscat showers carrots. But the impact on democracy’s checks and balances isn’t that different.

If ministers are not bound by the rules – until they rewrite them themselves – that is a recipe for political arbitrariness. If you engage people in ministries, on packages outside their pay scale, or by wreaking havoc on the implied rules concerning family and kin, that undermines oversight. Even the people engaged by ministries on a “voluntary” basis signal trouble. How do you hold someone like that to account?

Joseph Muscat may call it new politics. Many of us have seen it all before and we know that uglier consequences come sooner rather than later. Muscat’s tendency to appeal to “common sense” over codes of ethics, and to a “people” that he defines, has more than a faint echo of Mintoff’s boast that he was prepared to rule from the streets and the praise of “the aristocracy of the workers”. 

I’ll be criticised for not being “positive”. Then again, perhaps before long even the name Opposition will be criticised for not being positive enough.

In vibrant parliamentary democracies, being an Opposition is valued as a constructive, positive contribution to the system. In banana republics, it’s not. Opposition parties are divided and ruled, given carrots to keep them happy and positive, while allowed to survive to keep the show on the road. 

I’m all for social and political inclusivity. But when it comes to how to do it, I’d rather stick to the tried and tested. Not Mintoff’s, not Muscat’s, but classic democracy.

Dott. Buttigieg is a candidate for the Nationalist Party’s post of Deputy Leader for Party Affairs