Something strange has happened over the past couple of weeks: Joseph Muscat has lost control. He has lost control of the government, and it has become increasingly clear that he is rapidly losing control of the Labour Party, too. The rapidly mounting public anger that is coming at him and his crooked henchmen like an electoral tidal wave appears to be shared by some members of his caretaker cabinet, Labour Party officials and delegates and – it has now become obvious – even some of those he counted on as the party’s core voters. The situation is explosive, with simmering rage within his home territory, outrage among the electorate, and a visibly deteriorating Muscat reduced to fighting his campaign with the sordid-looking Owen Bonnici, Chris Cardona and Edward Zammit Lewis, while clutching at the empty space where the tragic Edward Scicluna’s credibility once was but is no longer.
As Muscat’s widely despised spouse – who has gone from sought-after patron to Elena Ceausescu in four brief years – notoriously said in a secretly-filmed video at a Labour meeting a couple of months ago: “But how is it poss-ee-bill?” Apparently, it is: Muscat and his crooked cowboy cronies are flying in all directions as the Indians ride into town for a bit of heavy scalping. And nobody is more surprised by this sudden turn of events, it appears, than the Nationalist Party.
But when you think about it, it really hasn’t been all that sudden. It’s a natural conclusion of the obvious. Popular support for Muscat was manufactured in a sea of lies and social bribery. That kind of support isn’t real. Everything he did in government was bound to make people furious: the corrupt deals, the jobs for the boys, the friends and family on the state payroll, the promotion of the seriously undeserving, the championing of sleazy people like Cyrus Engerer, the offensive collusion with John Dalli even as he was under investigation by the European Commission and should have been under investigation by the police in Malta, the protection of his close collaborators Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri, the money paid out in spades to cronies and henchmen for projects that were dreamed up especially for them. How Muscat thought he could get away with all this without raising people’s ire is beyond me to understand. It has certainly been a colossal failure of his imagination. The man who was so adept at finding the Achilles heel of the individuals he courted for votes has turned out in the end not to understand that corruption and cronyism keep lots of people happy, but make even more people wildly angry.
It is astonishing, truly astonishing, that the man who sailed to victory with an astounding 36,000-vote majority has ended up in this position after just four years, sabotaging Malta’s presidency of the EU Council of Ministers with a general election called in desperation (and still we don’t know the cause of that desperation), and hoping to trade in the last year of power for another five. Muscat’s electoral battle cry is continuity, that we can’t afford to axe his government while we are on this splendid road. Continuity is even the theme of the Labour Party’s campaign song. It cannot possibly have been more misjudged, because continuity is exactly what people don’t want. They don’t want continuity with Konrad Mizzi, Keith Schembri and their enabler Muscat. They don’t want continuity of corrupt deals. They don’t want continuity of armies of persons of trust paid out of the public purse while throwing their weight around. And they most certainly don’t want continuity of Michelle Muscat splurging taxpayers’ money on turning Villa Francia into her second home where she entertains her friends and fishy hangers-on.
When people have had enough, when they are telling you that they have had it right up to here with your corruption, greed and contempt for the rule of law, the last thing you should tell them is that they must vote for continuity. When people are shouting at you to get out now, you don’t respond by telling them how important it is that you stay on. It’s important to you, for your survival, but public opinion is now rather different.
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