Elections, especially the parochially contested ones, are on the whole farcical. But, as with all things funny, when humour is taken to stratospheric levels only tragedy can ensue.
This is what our local politics is becoming. A farce that rips out our sides to the extent that we bleed uncontrollably. Because while we laugh at our politicians’ antics, and at voters’ apathy and strange affiliations, Malta’s suffering will soon be beyond a cure.
Labour have been in power for over a decade. Most elections, general, local and MEPs, have become a one-sided affair. The PN have become the runners-up who thank the heavens for all small mercies. The recent MEP election was a case in point: Labour still won an overwhelming majority but shed thousands of votes from their previous showing. And the PN, because they came second in a race for two, celebrated.
Bernard Grech, the PN quasi-invisible leader, actually said that the country can see that the people want change. And yet the people voted more for the reds than the blues so even if less want Labour the majority still back the people in power.
In these circumstances the PN, lost in their own lost causes and in near existential extinction, rightly see the dip in the Labour Party vote tally as a good sign. They reason, and rightly, that hope is still slightly alive.
The reality is that the Labour Party should be bleeding votes that would put it in competition with the cranks who contest and garner a few dozen votes.
They have been in power for just over a decade and they haven’t merely destroyed all that was salvageable in Malta and Gozo. They have also turned our country into a pirate island known for its corruption, dicey justice, and politicians and hangers on indicted for crimes which would redden the faces of the bosses of the worst crime syndicates. Robert Abela and his team defend, and essentially glorify, criminals.
As far as I know, whenever an Italian politician was outed as having dealings with or condoning the Mafia, he became a pariah. In Malta, Joseph Muscat, who is accused in court – not by a journalist or an NGO – of crimes of outlandish proportions, endorses, backs and spoke at nearly all events of PL candidates for the MEP elections.
Joseph Muscat is also still being handsomely paid and accommodated by the government led by his successor Robert Abela. And Joseph Muscat still holds a diplomatic passport.
This is what the Labour Party in power has become. A defender and a facilitator of people who have been at the centre of the allegedly biggest fraud and heist the country has ever seen.
Instead of screaming out that we must uncover all the ones involved in fraud and corruption, the Prime Minister, the ministers, the Labour Party MPs, the MEPs and prospective MEPs, the Labour media, all defend the former Prime Minister and rail against anyone trying to get to the truth.
When even our Central Bank Governor and the Labour Party deputy leader are indicted, what worse scenario can you dream up? And when it contemplates all the horrors a former Prime Minister, his Chief of Staff and star minister are accused of, the mind – mine at least – stops functioning properly.
Because if this were a normal country we all would be protesting away. Instead, we vote these brigands back in. They who are worthy of nothing better than being shipped out to a faraway planet. The only worry is that, once landed on the planet, the Labour Party would definitely manage to ruin that planet beyond recognition.
Yet the Maltese electorate is happy with this state of affairs. They applaud, they cheer, they hit the Perspex at the voting hall because the Labour party is still winning, is still the biggest party in this country.
We really are a sad lot. And maybe we should all be shipped to that faraway, sad planet and let the cockroaches take over this country.
[email protected]