Everything is the same as in 2017. And everything is different.
On 1 May 2017 Joseph Muscat called Labour supporters out on a show of force to swamp the Egrant allegations which involved his wife Michelle.
The crowd that turned out was the most imposing crowd in recent history. It filled Castille Square and the surrounding area till the gates of the Upper Barracca, it overflowed to the road leading up to Castille and all spaces in between.
It was the answer to the question left unasked: the mass of people were solidly with Joseph. He could not fail. So reassured, he went to the President and resigned.
This time, in 2022, there was not the electric atmosphere of 2017. The crowd that gathered on the Granaries was more relaxed and the whole matter was wrapped up in a few minutes. By 11am it was over and Robert Abela had resigned.
I miss the 2017 time – and Joseph Muscat and his carefully crafted speeches. You could hear his voice coming from nearby yards and the timbre was unmistakable. I do not know who wrote those speeches for him but they fitted him like a glove.
By contrast Robert Abela is a flat speaker, full of bombastic hyperboles and lawyers’ expressions. If it’s any consolation, his counterpart, Bernard Grech, is as bad. His speech on Sunday, for all his shuffling of notes, was disjointed and, as seen on television, rendered worse by those sitting behind him who jumped up in unison at specific points in the speech (probably on a signal) while the guy just behind Grech kept looking at his watch all the time reinforcing the fact that Grech was rambling on and on. They can’t even organise an orgy in a brothel.
Anyway, the race is on, very much as it always does, with three or more events in the morning and a further three in the afternoon/evening, crisscrossing the length and breadth of Malta and Gozo, visiting every town and village but, so far at least, never meeting each other in a debate.
They all came up with their proposals, some brought down from the shelves where they had been collecting dust since they were last used in 2017, and some new. The newsrooms have a tough time reporting the speeches, analysing the proposals and also coping with the brickbats thrown at the other side.
Then there are the NGOs coming up with their proposals, too long to be decently summarised in a daily paper so they get spiked and put back on a shelf for the next five years.
Robert Abela is right to claim, as he probably might, he is surrounded by multiple nemeses. No sooner had he won the premiership race that Covid struck bringing everything to a halt and stopping all trade and cohabitation among people all over the world.
Now that Covid has mellowed and become softer, Putin’s Russia has invaded Ukraine. Trade and tourism which were looking like getting back to normal are now back to square one.
These are still early days in the election campaign, although many people’s minds are already made up. The sudden defection from PN ranks of four front-runners shocked people especially when they looked around and saw that others who should have already departed are still there after all this time.
Tourism has not got back to 2019 levels and international trade has been strangled to a halt by huge rises in freight costs and the massive uncertainty brought about by the war in the Ukraine. The plaster composed of the government help during Covid and the election sweetener popping in our postboxes over the coming days will soon shrivel up (apart from the fact that Malta’s finances are shot).
People of all sides know this too well but they still cannot bring themselves to trust a party that is still getting people angry almost 10 years after it was kicked out. That is the real situation right now.
The election was not derailed by Covid. It does not seem to have been derailed by the multiple cases, true or just alleged, of corruption in government officials. But it might get derailed by the consequences of the war in the Ukraine. The irony of course is having a prime minister up in Brussels joining in the condemnation of Putin while still getting paid for registering Russian oligarchs as Maltese citizens.
Others are just as bad. Cyprus has been called Russia in the Med on The Daily Telegraph while Boris Johnson for all his bluster rules over a London awash with Russian money and refuses to change anything .
When Robert Abela decided on the election date he was thinking about Covid and about relaxing the Covid restrictions. Although enough warnings had been made he never factored in a war in continental Europe.
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