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More than opinion, your recurring pieces about Arnold Cassola’s election to Italian parliament verge on character assassination, using both subtle and not so subtle means. Of course expressing differing opinions is perfectly legitimate. But when an ‘opinion’ is expressed by going to great lengths to cast Cassola (incidentally an old friend of yours) in a bad light without engaging in any rationale which gives logic to that ‘opinion’, then one begins to wonder what base emotions are motivating you for writing such pieces. Naturally, I and a few other readers do have more than an inkling as to the nature of these emotions. But that is human nature after all with reams and reams of literature about it dating from the times of the Greeks.
When comments like these come from columnists who are notoriously insular, provincial and inward looking, they are taken with a pinch of salt. Coming from someone like Saviour Balzan, well travelled and with strong German cultural and connubial connections — and from someone like Daphne Caruana Galizia, another arduous Europhile — these comments leave me totally dumbfounded.
As an Italian citizen (and a voter in Cassola’s electoral district) I am elated by his election and at being represented in Italian parliament. As a Maltese citizen with some hope of ever being represented in Maltese parliament, I cannot hide my utter disillusionment. Arnold participated in something like four or five national elections where a quota of perhaps two or three thousand votes would have been sufficient to get him elected. In the European Parliament election, where he stood a better chance, he missed by just a handful of votes. Now, in the collegio Europa, an electoral district of some 2 million voters, where only six deputies had to be elected from a total of 114 candidates from big shot parties like Forza Italia and Democratici di Sinistra (DS), and where to get elected voters actually had to specify the name of their preferred candidate (unlike voters in Italy who could only vote for the party), Arnold gets elected against all odds! Through sheer hard work he garnered more than 19,000 votes. He was the second to be elected of the six deputies, and he was the top one in many cities and countries, especially the Nordic ones. And when I say the Nordic ones, you will certainly understand the connotation.
The lesson is there to be picked up by the false prophets of electoral reform claiming hand over chest to have democracy close to their heart.
In more ways than one, Arnold has been a pioneer to unearth Malta out of its petty, inward clannishness to a broader-based world of cosmopolitanism. Starting with his election to the Secretary of European Greens, through the precedent he created by challenging the courts to prove his ineligibility to vote in the last national elections, and now by his astonishing election to Italian parliament.
Italians are, as a result of their rich history, inherently cosmopolitan, even if most can only speak Italian. Their parliament is one such example. In addition to all political beliefs being represented, from the smallest minority to the biggest, there are several naturalised foreigners who contribute to the intense political dialogue. Tana De Zilueta, for example, ex-journalist and correspondent for The Times and The Economist, is Anglo-Spanish. She is now a Green Senator, and a primary signatory of seven laws between 1996 and 1998. Prof. Khaled Fouad Allam, elected to the Lower House on the Olive Tree ticket, is a sociologist and prolific writer from Algeria. Other models in Italian civil society that are a testimony to the openness to foreigners and outside ideas that enrich political debate in that country are Egyptian (and Muslim) Magdi Allam, a popular columnist, commentator and deputy-editor of Corriera della Sera, and well-known English Historian Paul Ginsborg, author of several books on contemporary Italian history. The list of course is endless.
It is therefore not surprising that someone as enterprising and resourceful as Arnold has found his place in such a cosmopolitan milieu as Italy (a G8 country), where I am sure he will be more respected. As a close friend of Arnold for nearly 30 years, my advice is to forget trying to make political inroads in Malta. At least not for another generation. Nothing more fitting than the Latin maxim nemo profeta in patria seems to explain better that nobody can be a prophet in his homeland! But for the more prosaic and provincial there is a canny old Maltese proverb which I find perhaps a little more apt: l-ghira titrot wara l-gharef bhal dellu mieghu (envy follows the wise man like his shadow).
Alex Borg
San Giljan
Saviour Balzan writes: I have few cultural affinities to Germany. I do not speak or understand German and I do not follow German culture. I am a Maltese true and proper. I too have known Arnold Cassola since the year I founded Alternattiva and had consistently objected to his pettiness, self-centred and superficial political argumentations as many former Alternattiva Demokratika colleagues can confirm. I have no personal grudges against Arnold, as he can confirm in the long years I spent at AD. I wish him well but it should not stop me from noting that his mission to acquire Italian citizenship came at the end of his six years well paid Brussels appointment with the Greens and his failure to get elected in the European elections. An election where I too had foolishly voted for Cassola. Needless to say this is the last time Cassola will get my vote and I trust the Greens will have enough self-esteem not to choose him as their rep for the next European elections.
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