That the extreme-right views associated with Salvini, Le Pen and Boris Johnson – to say nothing of Trump – are taking a hold in Malta is evident. This normally happens because people find that they feel insecure in a changing, globalised world and hang on to symbols of the past such as those of the state or even those of the respective majority religion in the country.

This may have been a reason for the growth of ISIS in Muslim countries and it is surely a reason for the growth of the hard right in Christian ones. To see Salvini showing off and extolling his rosary beads and then letting children and adults, male and female, drown in the sea off our shores just because they are black-skinned, is typical of populists. They grasp the outside shell of past symbols but not the substance. They hang on to the ashes of the past which are no guarantee of the future. It is a sign of insecurity in dealing with the future and I have no doubt that, due to their incapacity to deal with globalisation effectively, they will eventually end up on the rubbish heap of history.

Their agenda not only revolves around immigration but also against pan-national structures such as the EU which is the only type of structure necessary to deal with globalisation! As I have stated before, quoting Angela Merkel, those who proclaim the merits of strict nationalism are those who are willing to face the world alone. America first is America alone. The UK outside the EU will be the UK, if it is not just England and Wales, alone! No imperialist haranguing over the past will save them. The tsunami let loose by globalisation will carry away everyone unless we build strong international and interstate institutions.

So I am not surprised that a person like Norman Lowell – who spews rubbish-laced invective strewn with anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric – is applauded by a larger section of the Maltese electorate. You see, feeling threatened by the international order, they seek to regress into a whites-only cum Maltese-only reserved club spiced with some neo-colonialists who think that everything the British establishment does is right, which implosively debates amongst itself, thinking it can ever effect the world order and leaving bodies strewn everywhere, as we have seen in the recent racist shooting in Birzebbugia.

This in no way surprises me, but to see a Catholic priest lend credence to this anachronistic and racist lot leaves me in a bewildered state and open-mouthed surprise. A priest of Christ extolling the vices of immigration, race and class is anathema. Ipse Christus, Alter Christus, is the lot ascribed to any Christian but particularly to a priest, and I cannot see Christ rummaging around with this populist lot, let alone extolling the virtues of racism. Have we not had enough in the recent past with the extreme right ideologies of Fascism and Nazism and the stink of death they left behind them? Does it only take 70 years for the devil to wipe away the collective consciousness and memory of the horrors of World War II? How can hatred, jealousy and snobbism fuel the prospects of the present generation?

Much of the present rise in populism in Malta and abroad is due to the weak political leadership of the centre. In Malta, particularly, people are bewildered at the incongruity and lack of effectiveness of the centre-right party, the PN. The PN has been locked in bitter in-fighting for some time now with the result that, unfortunately, it has ceased to become politically effective. It is now time for those who have been politically resistant to the change of properly elected leadership to fall in line and pull on the same political rope. Because while we squabble in the PN, the hard right has been eating out of our vote base!

My advice is to leave the past alone and work together for the future. It is the devil’s work to fixate on the past and its mistakes! We need to move ahead together now and recognise the real political opponents for who they really are – on both the extreme right and the extreme left. During the setting up of the Partito Popolare during the ravages post-risorgimento of Italian politics, Luigi Sturzo always emphasised the necessity of a centre party for moderates to beat off the extremes of both socialism and – especially – fascism.

The Popes had put in place a non-expedit which, in fact, paralysed the great masses of the Catholic centre from influencing Italian politics. It was only the encyclical Rerum Novarum of Leo XIII that opened the way forward for this approach and which was not, unfortunately, emulated sufficiently quickly by the Popes who came after him, further hindering the centre ground in Italian politics until after WW2, where its leaders helped rebuild the Italian nation and the EU.

It is this anti-EU rhetoric which often gives the populists away. Populists saying popular things which people want to hear but having no political substance whatsoever. I recently had a spat on social media with a Maltese acquaintance who is anti-EU and populist. He said he felt he was so because the Germans and Italians (different generations 70 years ago!) had killed his countrymen in the past.

Speaking about anachronisms of the past, I thought he had a place in the museum! He seems to have forgotten the ardent Catholicism of De Gasperi, Adenauer, Monnet and Robert Schumann who set up the EU with deep roots in Catholic social thinking. He then went on to praise the virtues of a British MP, Jacob Rees-Mogg who, he said, was an exemplary Catholic and gentleman and such a good Catholic that he even heard mass in Latin in the (pre-Vatican II reforms of Paul VI) Tridentine Rite, as if hearing mass in this rite made one a better Catholic than the others.

I have no qualms with – and do not want to judge – the Catholicism of Rees-Mogg but I do take strong exception to his politics. After all, even Adolf Hitler was a nominal Catholic who unfortunately followed the ideologies of Hegel and Nietzche. It is evident that the state of mind of Rees-Mogg, an ardent supporter of Brexit even with no-deal, is to retreat into a quaint secluded self-sufficient, smug English country-club, well insulated from the ravages of the increasingly globalising world.

Rheinhold Neibuhr, a Christian theologian, had long ago foretold of the temptation for Christians to retreat from the secular world because they felt threatened by it. In his Christ and Culture, he examines the possible action of the Christian in today’s world and – amongst several models which he finds insufficient – he suggests that Christians have an obligation to interact with the secular world as Christ himself did and ordered us to do. One must interact, discuss, debate, understand and work with others around us who might not share our beliefs and sense of values. This serves for us to learn, for them to learn and, ultimately, to give witness to the truth that there is only one which might, however, have several faces to it. Withdrawal will get us nowhere, whereas active interaction will, even though we might have to pay a high price for it.

The writing is on the wall. What remains is the activism of the centre which urgently needs to become strongly pro-active again.

 

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