European Parliament tells Muscat: Dispose of your waste elsewhere

Daphne Caruana Galizia Thursday, 17 March 2016, 11:02 Last update: about 10 years ago

Many of us watched Toni Abela’s question-and-answer session before the European Parliament’s Budgetary Commission the day before yesterday. We were in various stages of cringing embarrassment, depending on where we stood on the scale of support for the Prime Minister and his choices. And yes, everybody cringed, including those who voted Muscat and his band of 40 thieves into power – especially those, because they now feel that they are partly to blame for this state of affairs.

Abela’s performance was abysmal. If you haven’t watched it already, find the video recording on line and do so. It is an absolute must if you are to understand the flurry of accusations flying about now and get a good grasp on the context. Watching it is important for two main reasons other than those: to know the full extent of Muscat’s arrogance and ignorance in nominating Abela, and to know, once and for all, that what passes for normal behaviour in Maltese public life is considered completely abnormal outside Malta.

Watching it, I can’t say I felt smug. That would be completely the wrong word and also the wrong emotion. But I certainly felt vindicated. When I write about individuals like Toni Abela from the perspective of a normal person who is not mired in the weirdness of Maltese society, I find myself pilloried and subjected to abject insults, for all the world as though I am the freak and they are the established norm. Well, yes – they are indeed the established norm, but only for Malta. Elsewhere, their behaviour would be considered outlandish and many of the men in public life would be seen for what they are: nut-jobs in need of psychiatric care because of their quite manifest personality disorders. Yet in Malta, they are treated as though it is quite all right to behave the way they do, and it is those who, like me, point out that it is anything but all right who end up stoned in the public square.

People in Malta, especially people in Maltese political life, have become so accustomed to treating the abnormal as normal that they have fallen victim to the myth that Maltese normality is normality everywhere else and worse, that nobody can see them or judge their actions because even in the Internet world, their island status shelters them from external scrutiny.

I am not one of those who believe that the Prime Minister knew that Abela wouldn’t pass the test, and that he nominated him regardless as long as he could get him out of the Labour Party’s deputy leadership and clear the way for Konrad Mizzi. Yes, that was most certainly his motivation, but he was sure, quite obviously, that Abela would get through. Muscat does not knowingly create big problems for himself, and Abela’s rejection has created some quite large ones. He has an angry and humiliated Toni Abela on his hands, furious supporters (who he has tried to get off his back by blaming “those evil Nationalists” for the fiasco) and a party that is boiling with resentment which will, before long, be turned directly onto him. It’s a “you risked all this for Konrad” moment in which clarity crystallises and people begin demanding to know why.

No, Muscat never thought that Abela would be spurned and he doesn’t have a Plan B. The Prime Minister has become so accustomed to getting away with horrendously low standards at home that he has come to believe that he can get away with the same thing abroad. If the Maltese electorate was happy to ignore a recorded conversation in which the deputy leader of the Labour Party was heard describing a cover-up of cocaine-dealing at a Labour Party club, and vote for them anyway, then why shouldn’t the European Parliament’s Budgetary Commission overlook it too? Come on, it wasn’t serious. It was only a party leader colluding with minor party officials to get rid of the brick of cocaine being carved up in the party club kitchens and not tell the police because he couldn’t be certain that he would find a “Labourite policeman”. Funny how the members of the European Parliament’s Budgetary Commission didn’t do the same thing and laugh it off too; they must be really uptight. Those evil Nationalists must have been stirring the pot.

Muscat has also programmed himself and others to believe that anyone can do any job – he is, after all, Prime Minister - that fitness for purpose is irrelevant and that there is no such thing as merit. So he sent Toni Abela to face a grilling about his fitness for membership of the European Court of Auditors armed only with experience as “vice mayor of a large regional town in Malta”. Not only was this politely mocked, but one of the MEPs actually said, drily, that he had taken the trouble of checking out this “large regional town” only to find that it has a population of 10,000 – “which makes it a village”.

I am accustomed to watching Toni Abela show off and prance about and storm around in a Maltese context. He is truly ghastly and ignorant, quite insufferable and utterly boorish. And when I watch him, I think to myself that the true test, of how civilised and European a person is, is to ask whether that person would translate into a non-Maltese context. In other words, can he or she be exported? Can he or she behave the same way outside Malta and be taken as the norm or be understood? In Toni Abela’s case, that answer is definitely no. Outside the Maltese context, he is assessed for what he is: much the same way that I describe him and get insulted for it.

He and very many others do not see it that way, because in their book, it is people like me who are not normal because we are outside the realms of their sordid normality. Toni Abela and people like him think of themselves as “the true Maltese” when they are nothing of the sort. They are true something-or-other, that’s for sure, but I won’t put it down here. On Tuesday, exposed across Europe while wilting and stuttering under the sort of accusations that he had hitherto been accustomed to hearing only from “that Daphne who we ignore”, Abela might finally have woken up to the fact that it is his behaviour and that of his Labour Party which is completely abnormal in the European context, and not my description of it.