On two successive Sundays, a seemingly ad hoc crowd came together and demonstrated in Valletta.
One had an immediate cause to it - hunters protesting against the suspension of the hunting season - while there was no immediate cause for the other - a protest against asylum seekers.
I do not know, nor do I have any means to check, if there were the same people at the two demonstrations, but something tells me they were not the same groups, as the interest underlining their protest was different in each case.
Obviously, writing on Saturday, I have no means of telling whether the 'non c'è due senza tre' theory will hold and that we will be seeing the third 'spontaneous' demonstration today.
On one, level this double event shows that there is a growing body of dissatisfied persons around; though others, maybe the bulk of the electorate, may not agree with the hunting or anti-immigration ideas these people profess. These people have forcefully expressed their disapproval in ways that maybe the rest of the country does not agree with.
The disapproval, in both cases, was of the present government. In no way was the disapproval the work of the official Opposition: in both cases, the Opposition, by and large, sided with the government.
It is rather strange that the two demonstrations do not seem to have had any leaders, identifiable leaders, that is. It seems that the police, searching for the leaders of the hunters' demonstration, thought they had found the leader because of a post on Facebook announcing the protest, but it turned out that this person mentioned a protest was about to take place, but then did not go.
Still, in each case, it is strange that a crowd of people came together to protest, with flags and placards, and no one was doing the organising. But the fact that there were two protests on subsequent Sundays is no proof there is a common leadership behind the two protests. I do not think there is this hidden mind behind the two protests.
Had these two protests taken place under the PN administration, it would have been easy to see Labour somewhere behind them, for undoubtedly the two protests expressed ideas and opinions that were common to the Labour leadership. But Labour is in government now and the very fact these protests have taken place, in protest against the Labour government, can be a novelty on the political scene.
These were two substantial planks in the Labour electoral appeal. The experience of the past 18 months has shown a slippage from what was promised to what was delivered. I do not think these two issues were in any way material to the Labour electoral victory in 2013 - the hunters have always voted massively for Labour and xenophobia found willing echoes among Labour leaders.
So we can read Labour's mellowing in power to be moves to consolidate the middle ground, away from the traditional Labour heartland. Labour has found that it is impossible to push back the asylum seekers who make it to our shores and, while upping the rhetoric, has found it impossible pushing Europe to help shoulder the burden. So Malta has found it has no alternative but to join forces with Italy's Mare Nostrum, which is a weak copy of what Europe should be doing with ineffective Frontex.
On hunting, Labour has found it is locked in the deal Malta, under the PN, signed with the EU at the time of accession and there is no way it can overturn this agreement to anything that will please most hunters. Summarily suspending the hunting season must have pleased the political centre.
So Labour has bowed down to the inevitability of power, the many compromises that make the difference between being in Opposition and being in power. In doing so, it has moved more to the centre, though that may not have been the primary intention. And in doing so it has alienated part or parts of its core grassroots.
These people will still vote Labour, one may argue. Or will they?
All around us, in neighbouring countries, we see the exponential growth of parties and political formations born of anger and rejection. With the filter through which we tend to see most foreign news, these are the eurosceptics. No single party resembles the other, which is why they have found it difficult to come together in a political grouping, Marine Le Pen with UKIP, the German hard Left with the Greek Syriza, Italy's Cinque Stelle with ... oh, anybody else.
But this new Opposition, which made such big strides in the European Parliament elections, and which threatens to increase its percentage in the coming national elections, is built on strident opposition to Europe, the euro and the prevailing eurozone policies.
The two consequent protests are not far down that line, but not that far back. In truth, the hunting and the immigration issues the two crowds were protesting against derive from EU membership, although the political groupings I mentioned two paragraphs back would hardly identify them as such. It is still a short way from these localized and one-off protests to a more generic and structural anti-EU plank.
If this had to happen, and just as two swallows do not a spring make, so too it takes more than two spontaneous protests; this could ultimately lead to a redrawing of Malta's political landscape in ways we have come to see as impossible to envisage.
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