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Matthew Vella
It’s looking good for Arnold Cassola. Never the victor at home, his meteoric ascent beyond Maltese shores either says something about the Maltese electorate, or about the man whose political life has been carved in Brussels – right on rue Wiertz, outside the European Parliament’s hemicycle of well-paid parliamentarians and unctuous lobbyists, where for the past six years he worked as secretary-general of the European Green Party.
There Cassola met up with all the great names in European politics: hobnobbing with the man who would soon become his Presidente del Consiglio and the other gracious members of the Prodi Commission, talking radicalism and how to make sense of troubled pasts with the paunchy, erstwhile revolutionaries Dani Cohn-Bendit and Joschka Fischer, convening the world’s greatest gathering of green parties from Nader’s greends to New Zealander tree huggers, and eyeing that one seat in the European Parliament.
The son of Albert Cassola and Ethel Marks, the daughter of trade unionist John F Marks. Cassola was born in 1953. As a child he had a unique appearance on the Italian state TV’s child songfest Zecchino d’Oro. His university education was in Italy, where he would also take up a lecturing post at Rome’s La Sapienza, and then clinch a professorship at the University of Malta.
His corpus of work on the Maltese and Italian language and his unmistakable instinct for research would lead him to important discoveries in foreign libraries, notably penning the history of the 1565 Great Siege from the Turkish state archives, and unearthing a Maltese-Italian dictionary from the 1700s. In 1989 he was one of the founding members of Alternattiva Demokratika, the Green Party where he served as International Secretary, and was among the first to be elected to the Swieqi local council. By 1997 he was well on his way to the top post in the European Federation of Green Parties.
If there was one marked characteristic he knew he could depend upon, apart from his frugality and unassuming choice of clothing and ill-fitting jackets, it was his ambition, driving himself to be at the top of the heap. He may have his critics, among them some old party acquaintances who have since left the roost, but Cassola’s direction was ultimately driven by his own self-confidence and his performance with the European Greens ensured his re-election for a second term as secretary-general.
His sojourn in Brussels became the matter of a hotly contested legal challenge as to whether he was eligible to vote in the EU referendum of March 2003. The Malta Labour Party’s electoral office pushed to knock his name off the electoral register for not having spent enough time in Malta. Cassola managed to pull the carpet from under their feet when he couldn’t produce his old passport that could confirm the exact length of his intermittent stays in Malta.
The Maltese would however never elect the university professor to Brussels. His showing in May 2004 at the European Parliament elections proved that Alternattiva Demokratika could break the political mould in the unforgiving electoral deadlock of bipartisan politics – the sole candidate for AD, he won the hearts and minds of 23,000 voters, ending in sixth place. Cassola’s near miss at the European Parliament elections dealt a cruel blow to the man who was sort of made for the world of politicians. AD edged back in the tight space they occupied between the two party monoliths as they contemplated their grand success in the open world of European politics, with their role as a third party once again falling prey to mixed electoral vicissitudes.
And Cassola trudged back to the damp and cold weather in Brussels, where for the past six years he would religiously start his day with a couple of lengths in the municipal swimming pool, and from there walk to rue Wiertz for his typically long days of work.
And with two years left for his term in office, he contemplated his next move from there, thinking of whether he would have to move back to a stuffy office in Tal-Qroqq at the university where he will still retain his post, or map out some clever, quirky career move sideways.
Italian politics? And why not: his friends were there, he had already lived and loved in Rome, and he was also a Cavaliere della Repubblica Italiana, the honour bestowed upon him in 2003 by the Italian presidency. But most significantly for him, he was also Italian, a bloodline trickling all the way from Valletta back to his great-grandfather in Syracuse. His father had to relinquish his Italian citizenship at the start of WWII, but Cassola reactivated the process in 2000, dropped it, and then started it again in 2003, the year after the European parliamentary elections. A month after Malta’s accession to the EU he got the coveted Italian passport, gaining legal currency for his distended yet frank claim of having “sangue Italiano, qalb Maltija”.
When Silvio Berlusconi devised an electoral strategy to keep himself in power at Palazzo Chigi, by getting Italian nationals abroad to vote as well, Cassola and his propitious new passport enabled him to get drafted onto Romano Prodi’s centre-left l’Unione list as one of the top candidates for Italians in Europe. With over 19,000 votes, Cassola crowned his endless drive and ambition: he became an Italian MP.
So has he reached critical mass? Let’s wait for 2009.
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