The Malta Independent 13 February 2025, Thursday
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‘Establishment’, ‘Extremists’, and ‘Quality’: Some of Robert Abela’s buzzwords

Albert Galea Sunday, 26 January 2025, 08:30 Last update: about 17 days ago

There's nothing like a good buzzword in politics. Something that connects with voters, that people can identify with, that is unforgettable - for better, or for worse.

In his tenure as Labour Party leader, Robert Abela has used his fair share of buzzwords: some to convey a sense of positivity, and others to criticise and - at times - attack his adversaries.

From a shadowy, nameless establishment to an emphasis on quality, The Malta Independent looks at some of the buzzwords, which have defined Abela's political strategy in recent times.

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'Kwalita' - Quality

Where Abela's previous speeches were built in part about promoting "wealth" (ġid) and its creation for everyone, the new buzzword for what the Labour Party wants to hammer home nowadays is "quality".

It's born out of a cognisance of what the country is experiencing and what it is yearning for, as society en-masse appears to have come to something of a common realisation that wealth does not make up for a good quality of life.

Abela started speaking about this need for "quality" throughout 2024, so it came as no surprise when the government unveiled its budget slogan for 2025: Pajjiz ta' Kwalita - A country of quality.

Indeed, the word quality featured 28 times in Finance Minister Clyde Caruana's speech as he promised a "quality over quantity" approach to things such as tourism and the job market, and improvements to people's overall quality of life.

"The time has come to turn the page for the country to look for quality rather than quantity." This sentence closed Finance Minister Caruana's introduction to his budget speech before he went on to enlist the measures the government plans to implement in 2025.

Needless to say, since the budget speech, "quality" was the highlight of all public appearances by ministers and parliamentary secretaries who individually addressed the media to speak about their own portfolio.

Quality is what the people are looking for - but Abela's decision to make this his buzzword may well backfire if it's something that his administration cannot produce.

 

'Għaqda' and 'Flimkien' - Unity and Together

The theme of unity has been a big one for Abela from the very first days of his leadership.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, he said that "national unity" was key and that everybody had to be on "Team Malta" in order to get through the challenges at hand.

"While other countries and their people were devastated during this period, in Malta, the best qualities of our people emerged. Solidarity, love towards one another, national unity. These qualities must remain, even after the pandemic is over," he said in his end of year message for 2020.

It's a theme which he has stuck to since.

The Labour Party's slogan for the 2022 general election was Malta Flimkien (Malta Together) as Abela tried to drive home the point that the country works best when it is united for one set of goals.

Of course it's nothing new in the political scene: the PN's own slogan was Miegħek għal Malta (With you for Malta) and was likely born to foster that same sense of unity. There were similarly flavoured slogans in the past that aimed at this concept of unity: Joseph Muscat's 2013 Malta Tagħna Lkoll (Malta is of all of us) and Lawrence Gonzi's 2008 Flimkien Kollox Possibli (Together everything is possible) are two other excellent examples.

To this day, Abela keeps the concept of unity very much alive even in his weekly speeches to supporters. So much so, that on the occasion of his five-year anniversary speech - which was also his first speech of 2025 - he had a very simple, but to the point ending: "Where there is unity, there is strength." But then he failed to mention the 60th anniversary of Independence Day, celebrated last year, while highlighting the 50th anniversary of Malta becoming a Republic. The first is associated mostly with the Nationalist Party, the second with Labour.

 

Establishment

The word "establishment" dominated Abela's rhetoric in the run-up to the European Parliament and local council elections held in June 2024.

It's a term which Abela started to use in around April, when it became apparent that a magisterial inquiry that had been investigating the Vitals Global Healthcare hospitals concession from the times of Joseph Muscat was about to be concluded.

Abela questioned the timing of the inquiry's conclusion as he warned that a nameless "establishment" was working to undermine the country's democracy.

Abela's answer on who this so-called "establishment" was made up of differed depending on who posed the question and when it was asked: at times it was the judiciary - whom he warned against committing "political terrorism", on other occasions it was the Nationalist Party, while civil society, a particular supposed faction within the Nationalist Party, journalists, and pretty much anybody who was critical of the Labour Party were also labelled as being part of this shady group of people.

Months later - after the PL's decade-long super majority that it had enjoyed in every election from 2009 onwards had dissipated in the June polls - Abela would admit that he could have been more cautious in his choice of words.

Was it all just a political game? Was it an electoral buzzword to drive his diehard cohort of voters into the voting booths? Whatever the intention, Abela has not used the term since Malta went to the polls in June.

 

Fake news

Since the term was coined and shoved into the mainstream by Donald Trump, it has been part of the political rhetoric everywhere.

However, while Abela has on rare occasions used the term "fake news" against the media - just this week, he said that 90% of what is written on The Shift is fake news (an utterance which has resulted in his being sued), the Labour Party has directed the term more at its political adversary.

On a number of occasions, the PL has labelled the PN as being the "party of fake news". In September, it said that health workers were the victims of the PN's "fake news politics", and the following month lamented that the PN had no issue in spreading fake news but had issues in apologising for it.

There were three more occasions in October alone where the PL issued media statements leading with the PN being spreaders of fake news.

This continued right up until the present, and where the PL chooses not to use the term fake news, it resorts to simply calling the PN "liars".

 

'Forzi tad-Dlam' - The forces of darkness

While Abela has tried to project a sense of unity, particularly among his supporters - paradoxically he has tried to drive home that point by using several tropes and phrases to instil the belief that there are people out there who are trying to sow division.

Since the festive period particularly, Abela has used the phrase "forces of darkness" more than once to refer to those who, in his mind, are attacking the government and its ministers.

It's something of an Establishment 2.0, if you like - but he's been a bit more tactical, choosing to use the term to refer specifically to a targeted faction, which he wants people to think exists within the Nationalist Party.

Several adjectives have followed - hate, for example is one of them, as he described these so-called forces of darkness as people who "revel in hate" during his five-year anniversary speech. "Hypocrites" is another heavy term that he's used time and time again to describe both the PN and members of civil society.

Reacting to recent news that the NGO Repubblika - one of the chief harbingers of darkness in the Prime Minister's books - had criticised a magistrate's decision against a challenge they had filed, Abela said his duty is to fight against the "hypocrites of righteousness".

It's an example of the harshening rhetoric that the Prime Minister is adopting against his critics.

 

'Estremisti' - Extremists

Another example is more striking: Abela has long tried to find a way to associate the Nationalist Party with elements of civil society such as Repubblika. His latest play in this regard is to describe them as "extremists".

One of the Labour Party's major attack points against PN leader Bernard Grech ever since his election was that he was "put there" by a "faction" of people within the PN who "believe they have a divine right to govern" and that - therefore - he was under their control.

This is the same supposed faction within the PN that Abela branded as part of the "establishment" - to little positive effect.

Now he has taken on a new buzzword, by branding this demographic as "extremist". There are a few people in the crosshairs of this identification.

Jason Azzopardi is the prime target - a former PN MP up until 2022 who is Repubblika's lawyer and who the PL like to portray as being the chief of the "holier than thou" crowd attacking the government.

With him is also Karol Aquilina. He's still an MP, but the fact that his brother, Robert Aquilina, is the honorary president of Repubblika and in many ways the face of the organisation has been used to draw one and one together.

Just last Wednesday, the Labour Party referred to Karol Aquilina as the "de-facto leader of the Nationalist Party" and referred to an "extremist branch which is leading the Nationalist Party".

This is Abela's latest political gamble: shore up his supporter base by ostracising a few political critics.

It's also a tactic to force the PN into an error - come to the staunch defence of Azzopardi and Robert Aquilina, and it'll play exactly into what Abela and the PL are saying; say and do nothing, and the PN risks alienating a part of its voter base which does identify with these members of civil society.

Politics is a game, but the more time passes the more toxic the game is getting - and that's not something to herald any good news for the country in the near future.


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