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Karl Schembri
They are mostly silent but some of them are shouting to be heard. The unlikely campaigners are coming out, protesting against more construction and destruction, aesthetic degradation, political arrogance and direct Cabinet interference on planning decisions.
They are largely middle class, pale blue voters, most of them taking to the streets on the frontline for the first time, but what is seemingly the natural evolution of the same civil society that rallied behind the Nationalist Party’s vision for EU membership finds itself antagonised and alienated by the same party that can’t even stand a funny placard.
It goes as high up as the Prime Minister, who went as far as requesting that the pro-environment leaders distance themselves from what was a tongue in cheek poster – Vote George, Get Lorry – and which Gonzi has inadvertently turned into a symbol of defiance against him.
The reply the prime minister got was, really, a cake in his face: Vote Gonzi get Caqnu, is that better Prim?
It gets worse. At the helm of this growing civil movement are no longer the hard-line environmentalists.
In this case, it doesn’t work. They come from diverse backgrounds, springing out of specific enclaves of civil campaigning ranging from high heritage societies to free countryside rambling activists. Their leadership takes the form of Astrid Vella, the “one small woman” as the Sliema resident described herself last week against the virulent spin and downright lies about her coming from government circles.
“This concerted campaign to discredit me with letters in the newspapers just proves how scared the government is of this movement that one small woman has unleashed,” Vella told the press a few weeks ago. “If they were in the right, as they claim, they would not be running so scared as they are.”
Scared is not the right word to describe the ruling party. It’s about a deep-rooted assumption in the Nationalist psyche, tinged with bitter arrogance, that the battle for civil rights is its exclusive territory, as party pundits evoke images of Eddie Fenech Adami wearing a bullet proof vest at Tal-Barrani as he confronted the Labour thugs in the eighties.
That’s where the freedom clock stopped for the party that, it’s turning out, steered Malta into Europe for all the wrong reasons (such as standing up against divorce directives, lobbying for Spring hunting, and inventing a departure tax when we were just sniffing our new found freedom to roam around the European mainland without a passport).
They are signs of an administration in its geriatric years that has not only lost its sense of humour but the whole plot altogether. Last Sunday, the PN’s newspaper il-mument dedicated its whole editorial questioning former Din l-Art Helwa President Martin Scicluna’s “credentials to open his mouth and attack the government using every possible means”.
The arguments put forward by il-mument’s editorialist against the widely respected gentleman known for his British propriety betray the party’s bizarre and extreme intellectual incapacity to dialogue with its traditional allies. The language is so creepily aggressive and shockingly primitive.
“Not whoever has these rights (of free expression) has the credentials to do so (express himself),” the editorial proclaimed.
“We’ve noticed in the last week that some persons were more prominent in their attack against the Nationalist Government and with their harsh language tried to use their influence to turn public opinion against the government. One of them went as far as defending whoever came up with that injurious placard against Minister George Pullicino in an article on an English newspaper.”
Confirming the party’s utterly petty and parochial sense of history, besides outright flawed logic, the editorialist took Scicluna to task for not protesting with the Nationalists in the times of Lorry Sant.
“We have every right to ask this gentleman: where was he in the seventies and eighties when the Lorry mentioned in that placard was making a whole disaster out of the environment?” the editorial said, going on to ask where Scicluna was when Fenech Adami’s house was destroyed in 1979, where he was in 1984 during protests against Labour’s stand on church schools and in the rest of the eighties when “people were almost dying of thirst because we had run out of water”.
Incredible isn’t it? Never mind that Scicluna was then a senior military advisor at the British Ministry of Defence responsible for counter terrorism in Northern Ireland. He was neither dying of thirst nor protesting against Il-Lorry, so he has no credentials “to open his mouth now”.
Seriously, if this is the same party that took us into Europe, then it might as well align us to the Axis of Evil. Home Affairs Minister Tonio Borg would perhaps be happier to annex Malta to the Vatican, given his anti-abortion fetishes and his party’s stand on IVF, stem cell research and other extremely complex scientific possibilities dismissed by the Pontiff.
For all the harsh language attributed to Martin Scicluna, he wrote on The Times that the “Vote George Get Lorry” placard struck him as a “grotesque caricature”, adding in his typical understatement that “the potential destructiveness, damage and unacceptability of what is being proposed, as well as the interference of the government in a supposedly independent planning process, renders the ‘Vote George: Get Lorry’ placard comparable and, therefore, not inapt.”
Clearly inapt is the government’s way of handling dissent, to the extent that a growing mass of voters are feeling totally unrepresented. Disenchanted with the traditional politics of patronage, they realise the PN has sown the seeds of its own destruction but are mostly unlikely to shift to Labour. Alternattiva may be closer to their heart, but more as a peer group than for its political leadership.
George Pullicino may dismiss them as mentally inapt, but they are sane enough to see through Alfred Sant’s strategy of empty rhetoric dished out in the form of report upon report, a whole litany of ‘abbozzi’ with the latest one on pensions saying we should only worry about them in 2030, but then we’d probably already be all dead by global warming.
Of course civil society is far wider than the hundreds protesting against the extension of development zones, and the silent majority of disenchanted voters remains rather elusive. The latest Eurobarometer survey found that the faith of the Maltese in government had plummeted to 38 per cent, down from 51 per cent last autumn, with political parties enjoying the trust of just a quarter of the Maltese.
Coupled with the increasing costs of living, nepotism, government arrogance and wide apathy even when faced with the most damning of evidence, there is also the absolute denial that something is terribly wrong at the highest levels. The ADT driving exam bribery scandal confirmed not only the widespread rumours of corruption but also the total lack of scrutiny at the time when the transport authority was being set up, with the overriding concern clearly being giving jobs for the boys at the expense of quality.
But the greatest form of denial came last week in Investments Minister Austin Gatt’s motion to investigate the National Audit Office. Faced with one of the most damning reports to come out of the Constitutionally set up office about the squandering of public funds at the Voice of the Mediterranean, government turns the guns on the messenger and opens a broadside, just like it did a couple of years ago when then Ombudsman Joe Sammut exposed the extent of government’s indifference to his reports.
Gonzi’s administration is also glaringly short of a mission, a battle cry that rallies support, imagination and enthusiasm. Within the corridors of the PN’s headquarters, activists whisper about an early election, as they believe the changeover to the Euro is bound to be an electoral liability.
Gonzi will perhaps be remembered for the monumental ideas that never took off: a golf course on agricultural land, artificial islands, rebuilding the Opera House site, the most disappointing of all, the pledge to start a new way of doing politics.
It is clear the only new of doing politics is coming from outside the political class.
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