Joseph Muscat was given the name of salesman of Malta soon after being made Prime Minister.
The reason for this was his campaigning for Henley and Partners all over the globe to promote the IIP and for his association and entrepreneurship with shady characters such as Ilham Aliyev, President of Azerbaijan, Seyed Ali Sadr Hasheminejad, owner of Pilatus Bank and Ram Tumuluri, former Vitals boss. The Jordanian investors Sadeen of the quasi-defunct American University of Malta were also on his sales trip.
This hybrid model of the good thief meets ex-PN grievances worked well for a while. Where opening a door onto your roof under PN’s Mepa was an enterprise to be undertaken by only the fierce, another 2 or 3 floors were added to your hotel or apartment block no matter where it stood. Where hunting was becoming regulated, he opened the skies for anyone with a gun and a trap. No place to build? No problem, ODZ now easily approved. On and on it went. In return, all Muscat asked for was a blind eye from the public on alleged corruption and a cabinet of profiteers.
It is only now that all the compromises that were made to enable this vast enterprise of corruption are coming home and the length to which they went to protect their assets. At the head of each one we meet Robert Abela. He was there all along and he was the designated rubber stamp. He is frustrated. He is irritated and he is squirming at the information that has come out and likely will continue to come out on his weekend part-time jobs.
Hence the hastily called election. The incidental matter of an election programme that is serious and can actually be implemented is of no real consequence. What matters is selling the PL brand of hybrid government – something for you in EU funding and more for the party in the way of business so that it can stay in power and send you cheque refunds when they need to bribe you into believing them.
This PL campaign is not being fought. It is being bought. On one level, there is the onslaught of digital advertising and media bombarding with empty messages without limit and on the other, signed cheques sent to homes and individuals a week before the voting starts. Another salesman but one caught in his tracks. At this point, Abela tries to sell himself but with all the dirt being revealed about his unscrupulous partnerships, he had to rely on a promise of a refund in order to boost sales.
Like Putin, this juvenile bunch of Labour cronies are all out for their luxury life-style, putting all their fancy partners and family on the payroll, ensuring that their investments will be good for a more than decent pension. A minister gets kicked off the cabinet for having breached ethics and is rewarded with a €28,000 termination package. This really turned out to be a neat bit of business for Rosianne Cutajar. Win win. A profit wherever she turned. The stuff that Labour are made of. The very poster girl of rising to every opportunity and making a fool out of the system and its punishers.
Compromises come with the terrain. Labour land means you give up your freedom to say what you like and to live in a normal country with laws that are respected and equal opportunity and real prospects. It means that you cannot even trust to answer a survey and that you fear to be black-listed by saying anything that can be interpreted as criticising Labour. But you compromise because you have an income. Not necessarily what one understands by a job, but an income of sorts. One day you may need a favour. How many of you have had to wait for hours at Outpatients as person after person is called in before you? Those phone calls by the staff of candidates are the artery through which they pump the life-blood. The important thing is that you are a Labour brother.
The anomaly of the Maltese is that they know they are being fleeced, they see the bribes and corruption coming from all around those who have power and yet they allow themselves to be duped. Maybe it is because our freedom of thought is fast being eradicated and our moral compass is seriously compromised by self-preservation and lack of honour. The very word of integrity could not find its place in the finally-published PL manifest. There just wasn’t a sentence that could accommodate it and eventually, having to be mentioned somewhere, it fell to a Freudian slip where they said they would fight against corruption and integrity.
And so it seems that the gerrymandering of the ’81 election is repeating itself. Independent candidate Arnold Cassola has reported the Prime Minister and Finance Minister to the Electoral Commission, saying they were breaching the electoral law.
The distribution of cheques to compensate for the cost of living on the eve of an election amounts to “corrupt practices”, Cassola charged in his letter.
If found to be in breach of the law, the very result of the election could be nulled and voided. Such is the way we enter an election in Malta. On the back of corrupt practices, bribes, phone calls to solicit votes and an electoral manifest by the PL that everybody knows is the very opposite of their intention and practice.
They try to make all the right noises on paper, flood the internet with Robert’s voice and face and give out all the “right” permits without any break for a cease-fire. The latest, following hot on the heels of the Sannat permit for the block of 73 apartments of the 125 project, is the lifting of the turtle-dove spring hunting moratorium. Absolutely in-your-face couldn’t give a damn vote buying. We all know that hunters make up the bulk of the Labour majority. How scared are they of losing votes? But in doing so they are ensuring that whatever is in their electoral manifest is nothing but dribble.
It is the sad reality, though, that the majority of Maltese and Gozitans find it hard to feel any indignation. Either it is a product of their upbringing and lack of education, where they are told to remain quiet and obey their parents or due to a lack of imagination and empowerment. For many, they get their empowerment from a Labour government and a Prime Minister who inhabits the same air as criminals and spends their money because he wants them to believe they have it. A patriarchal figure who makes them think they are disco babes and can stay out all night. Tal-Ajkla independent candidate also leaned into this mindset, offering free breast enhancement procedures.
After the election, they may face a hang-over but the party was worth it! In the words of Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart…
Hey, hey, we're the Monkees
And people say we monkey around.
But we're too busy singing
To put anybody down.
We go wherever we want to,
Do what we like to do
We don't have time to get restless,
There's always something new.