There is always in front of us for our choosing, in politics as in other areas of both social and individual activity, a high road and a low road.
There are those amongst us who opt for a low road, because they have lost trust in the high road. There are those that consider the high road much more arduous, and more liable to failure and misery.
Some are tempted to imagine following Machiavelli, that in politics; craft, cunning, subterfuge, faking facts and hiding intentions is the ‘low’ way to success. Machiavelli himself had very little political success. He has had great notoriety in giving bad, even perverse advice to Princes.
Some politicians did not need Machiavelli’s guidance, they had an ingrained gift for legerdemain, further refined in practice. There has also arisen a new class of professionals in the art of public deceit at the service of the ‘princes’.
Again the public, now as in the past, does not always see through certain tricks. The means available for the transmission of propaganda are today more powerful, and yet more subtle. So the low road today looks even more enchanting. Politicians in the older as much as in the newer democracies are seen thronging through the low road, which at times has even lowered down its camber.
We are experiencing a Coronavirus pandemic, which is a major threat to our lives and ways of living, but we are also suffering from another scourge: the loss of trust in principle and in truth.
In Malta the natural admiration for men and women of principle in the face of adversity, further strengthened by the moral fiber preached by Catholicism, was seen in the way people voted: fakes were regularly sieved out of the positions of public trust.
In the recurrent Nationalist Party’s history, one can attribute the successes of its leaders, as much as to their adherence to principle as to their political intelligence. All of them had to face internal criticism for being steadfast in their beliefs and for not stooping down to momentary acquiescence in less principled advantage.
Even a formidable adversary such as Dom Mintoff, parliamentary debates testify, admired openly those principled men, although he himself engaged with some of them in true fierce antagonism.
Unhappily, what we have been observing in the political management of our affairs by the Labour Party in Government after the departure of Alfred Sant, has been a relaxation in matters of principle. A signal was given by the sale of Maltese passports. That was still for the general public on an “appreciable level” plain. But none can counter argue to the fact that what is now being discovered in the evidence submitted in the recent Court cases and the Montenegro scandal is beyond doubt bewildering. The Maltese public is witnessing a diffuse lowering of principled conduct by people in very high places within the Labour party.
Our people, rightly, expect the highest level of standards from their politicians. I have been in politics long enough to be able to affirm that in their great majority, the members elected to Parliament in the ranks of both political parties have tried to live up to their constituents’ expectations.
Yet the mirage of success obtained by underhand corrupt practice is always tempting. In opposition we are duty bound to point out the correct and in the end, the truly successful road. We won elections brandishing the motto :Is-Sewwa jirbaħ żgur ( Righteousness will surely prevail). We have not stepped back and will strongly continue to adhere to that principle.
Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici is a PN MP and is the party’s Spokesperson for Foreign Affairs and Europe in a World without Borders