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It has been a bad week for the Opposition Leader, Alfred Sant. In spite of the fact that the studio audience on last week’s edition of Xarabank was obviously stacked with an MLP rent-a-crowd howling for Lawrence Gonzi’s blood because of the recent spate of job losses in the clothing industry, that programme will only be remembered for Alfred Sant’s classic Freudian slip.
According to Sant, if he were in government, he would have saved (or attempted to save) those job losses by fiddling and messing around with EU rules. Sorry, but that is the nearest I could get to the Maltese word – inbazwru – used by Alfred Sant. Apart from the fact that the only way this could have been done was for Malta to subsidise – even if indirectly – Levis or some such other international clothing giant, Sant’s howler belies his astounding lack of seriousness and amateurish attitude. Not that fiddling and messing around EU rules has not been done in many a EU member state, but surely Alfred Sant must be the only leader of a political party in Europe who has the gall to go on national television and declare such fiddling and messing around as his party’s official ‘policy’!
Even more amazing was the way that he entered straight into what should have been obviously a Nationalist Party trap when he opted to dedicate a substantial part of his speech in Parliament on Monday to defend his record during those 22 months when he proved to be the most rickety Prime Minister in Maltese history. Having been taunted on the taxation announced in the 1998 budget that eventually led to his administration’s demise, Alfred Sant fell for it hook, line and sinker by putting his past performance as Prime Minister exactly where the PN wanted it to be: back on the current political agenda!
Comparisons are odious, but the PN stands to gain if it pits Lawrence Gonzi’s performance as Prime Minister with Alfred Sant’s. Incredibly, Alfred Sant has now made it easier for the PN propaganda machine to start harping on this comparison and keep on making the most of it until the next election.
In his speech last Wednesday, the Prime Minister had the easiest of tasks to shred Alfred Sant’s boasting about his 1997/98 performance into tatters. The Prime Minister’s tour de force included such gems about Sant’s claim that his administration had carried out maintenance and upgrading works in 160 state schools when in actual fact there were only 136 such schools at the time, leading the PM to taunt Sant about 24 ‘phantom’ schools which, he later added for even more punch, are very much like the ‘phantom’ majority against EU membership in the 2003 EU referendum!
Incidentally, Alfred Sant’s boast that his administration had spent a million liri or so for the purchase of computers to be used as a teaching tool in state primary schools was simply a reference to his government’s carrying on with a project that had been kicked off when I was minister responsible for education, in spite of the fact that he had pooh-poohed the project in Parliament when in Opposition.
Even more pathetic was his claim that the 1998 increase in water and electricity tariff were not the ones that were announced in that year’s budget, but the ones that his Cabinet had agreed upon ten months later in August 1998, some two or three weeks before the election that gave the opportunity to the Maltese electorate to send Alfred Sant and his acolytes back where they belonged – on the Opposition benches.
On Monday, he compared the current tariffs with the recently announced 55% surcharge with the tariffs agreed upon by his Cabinet ten long months after the 1998 budget was announced in November 1997, even though these rates were never legally applicable and no one had ever received a bill based on them! This served only to remind everyone what had happened after Alfred Sant launched what was historically the most astronomical increase ever in these tariffs: Alfred Sant was so taken aback by the public reaction - which he had not anticipated because of his lack of political nous - that he had then spent ten months fiddling and messing around (ibazwar) with the water and electricity tariffs!
It might well be that in Parliament last Monday, Alfred Sant was speaking for the diehard labour supporters following him on Super One TV from their homes or from MLP clubs, now dubbed as centres. If this was the case, then this was another miscalculation. What Alfred Sant should be seeking now is not the endorsement of his blind supporters but the sympathy and approval of those among the voters who opted for the PN in the 1998 and 2003 elections and who genuinely feel that the PN has overstayed at the top and should be given a rest via a spell in the Opposition. It is these voters that need convincing not his party stalwarts. Yet, it does appear to me that all his efforts in the last week were misdirected and they have not raised his status on the credibility stakes in any way. Rather than seizing the opportunity of a lifetime, Alfred Sant ended up making one false move after another.
Alfred Sant’s avowal that he is a would-be fiddler of EU rules was the start of a week during which he only managed to keep repeatedly putting his foot in it, demonstrating that he is a veritable fiddler on the hoof!
micfal@maltanet.net
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