|
Fusty, middle-aged, chauvinist – the acerbic flavour of Dr Josie Muscat’s new right-wing formation was there for all to savour. A mainly male audience, and just a dozen youths: Muscat’s rousing oratory yesterday was all about “the people of 1964 and 1979”, those who witnessed Malta becoming a sovereign nation, “but whose state of decay today would be regrettable to people like Gorg Borg Olivier and Dom Mintoff”, the leaders who gave Malta independence and the republic, respectively.
And with that introductory remark, Muscat set the tone to his tribute to Malta’s past as a genteel island ruled by clerics.
To Josie Muscat, the doctor and private hospital owner, political hygiene, decay and cleanliness are part of his organic politics. Cleaning up the country, bringing back the profusely fertile families of yore (Muscat himself has six children), and re-instilling civic and patriotic values in today’s dissipated youth: Muscat may have been feeble in his disclaimer that ideologies belonged to the past, but here were the unmistakable ingredients of the new face of the right-wing in Malta (smaller government, anti-immigration, and an emphasis on public order).
Professor Roger Griffin, an academic expert on the far right, has spoken of the “fascist’s obsession with the nation’s current decadence and imminent rebirth in a nebulously conceived post-liberal new order”.
If Muscat mourned the demise of youth to one torn by the ravages of alcohol, drugs, and “sexual depravity” (it-telqa taz-zghazagh ghas-sess), certain young members of his audience were not strangers to this life of debauchery. But that was just one of the instances in which Muscat, whose return to politics was marked by his election as Marsaskala councillor last year, seemed out of synch.
His definite hallmark was the exaltation of the past: the proliferation of children in bygones families that bred like guinea pigs (qishom fniek ta’ l-indi) which he hailed as the envy of so many other societies. Unlike this past Muscat still hankers after, today’s youth no longer cherishes a work ethic, but instead has turned into a bleary-eyed mess who resent waking up for work, “because they spend their nights drinking”, Muscat bawled. And the family, Muscat hollered, “the basis of Maltese society”, was neatly compartmentalised by “the sweetness that our mother gives us” and “the discipline our father instils in us”.
“For it’s men that we need to be!” Muscat suddenly shouted in an impassioned plea to his confreres and onlookers at the Phoenicia Hotel ballroom, his fleshy features darkening into a scowl. “You see men who don’t even know their own address, and who ask their wife ‘where do we live?’ Their wife! He asks his wife!” Muscat chirped, charming his audience with the well-worn, macho mirth so typical of the small island he was proud of.
The delusion yesterday was palpable at the unveiling of his new party – Azzjoni Nazzjonali. Glorious marches trumpeted merrily from the tannoy. The flags with the AN logo – two crescents, blue and red, pointing at each other – were draped everywhere and a large Maltese flag hung from above. As the AN’s speakers – Josie Muscat, Angelo Xuereb, Philip Beattie – and two unnamed co-founders sat down to address their audience, Ravel’s Boléro was cut short into its triumphalist crescendo. Despite claims of having a vast team, no candidates or political members were presented. And with only 200 people in attendance for the party which Muscat so boldly claimed was to be a new chapter in Malta’s history, the whole big bluff had been played even before the game started. People nod their heads, just like one of those American movies in which the “decent” folk rise up against biker gangs invading their town: so far there is nothing here to support Muscat’s contention that the AN will prove a major force in politics.
George Tabone, a Smash TV talk-show host, whose family business is Gram Jewellers, presented the speakers. Paul Salomone, notorious for his inflammatory speech in the anti-immigrant march two years and his verbal attack on MaltaToday editor Saviour Balzan, was up on the top floor balcony, releasing blue, white and red balloons as the speeches came to a close.
Two other co-founders who sat by the sides of the three speakers remained eerily silent. When I asked one of them, a man with in an ill-fitting suit and gold earring (alongside the dapper Angelo Xuereb, the conspicuousness was painful), who he was and what his role was, he answered “Kenneth”. “Have you a got a surname, Kenneth?” I asked. “No, it’s just Kenneth. You can write that,” he replied sternly. So I did. Silent Kenny, courageously standing for election at a polling station near you.
Josie Muscat, 62, born in Qrendi, is representing a new kind of disgruntled voter, and is the most vocal former Nationalist to rally against his old party. He is known as one of the few Nationalists with balls who fearlessly campaigned in Labour strongholds in the south. He was elected to parliament in 1966 at the age of 21, withdrawing in 1986.
“I don’t like it one bit that a prime minister who succeeds another prime minister, decides to appoint his predecessor President within the next days,” was his dig yesterday at the appointment of his former party leader Eddie Fenech Adami as president. He was blatant in his appeal to voters: “If your party has turned you away, AN is the party to unite all these voters. That’s why we have taken up the red and blue colours.”
The roly-poly Philip Beattie, 43, who lectures banking and finance at the University of Malta, had a more charismatic, classroom appeal. “I believe in the natural order and the Catholic order, which can create a genuine progress… I believe in the right to life, the right to the family (heterosexual), right to private property, right to defend national/cultural identity… I believe in tradition and national pastimes.” Hunters’ lobby reps Lino Farrugia, Joe Perici-Calascione and Joe Buttigieg were listening eagerly in the audience.
Beattie exemplified “the large segment of unrepresented voters in Malta” with the National Bank of Malta shareholders, who remain up to this day without a penny in compensation for the forced nationalisation of the bank back in 1974. It is a lazy example: surely there are more unrepresented voters than the rich and noble Cassar Torregiani, Busietta, and Montalto families.
Angelo Xuereb, 54, the self-made construction magnate and former Naxxar mayor, listed 58 reasons why he was entering politics: “because I am a patriot… because Malta needs more people who have made a success of their careers… who are ready to contribute their abilities granted unto to them by the grace of God Almighty… because I can get more EU funds.”
He will fight for better roads, more public-private partnership projects, public transport reform, more tourist facilities for the Grand Harbour, rebuilding the Royal Theatre to its former glory, licensing building contractors, reducing bureaucracy at MEPA… all proposals drawn not just on his own experience, but also his private interests. And, he complained, not enough attention was being given to architecture and the quality of development – a claim he will have to answer to after his development of The Palace Hotel in Sliema resulted in structural damage to the Stella Maris chapel.
Josie Muscat, his physical presence less convincing than the angry timbre of his soapbox rhetoric, gave the more impassioned speech. Medium height with a slight paunch, greying hair, his round face scowling as he shouted rhetorical questions such as “which of you has faith in our Courts?” to the yea-sayers in his midst.
His proposals are all Constitutional, in that they require two-thirds of the House to pass (granted that AN are elected to power, and recognised as the formidable power-broker they have already made themselves out to be). And yet the mistake is that in their fixation to curb over-spending or prune unaccountable officials, Muscat’s response is to reduce political representation (and consequently, democracy): a parliament of 55 MPs, 45 of whom will be elected from five regional districts, whilst the other 10 elected from a nationwide constituency; a seven-minister Cabinet appointed by a directly-elected President who must have been absent from politics for two years prior to taking up power; another four technocrats co-opted as non-voting members; abolishing local councils, to be replaced instead by five regional councils. Councillors cannot be party-affiliated (just like Josie of course, but before he launched his own party). Then there were reasonable proposals: levelling MPs’ pensions, a Whistleblower Act, regulation of party financing, reform in the appointments of commissions and the Broadcasting Authority.
On immigration, Josie wants our EU cousins to take in our asylum seekers after one month of us having fed and clothed them. And what if they don’t, Josie? Will you slam your handbag on Frattini’s desk and ask for your money back?
But it was the right-wing invectives which charmed the shorts off all those whooping participants. Muscat attracting his first roaring applause when he asked: “have you heard any minister ever say a word about those soldiers and police in physical danger of certain illegal immigrants, and the diseases they face?” “We have two types of immigration – that coming in by boat, and the one by visa… about one-third of all Maltese are married to foreigners… in 20 to 30 years’ time, we’ll be overruled by foreigners,” he warned, saying his team had “studied” all these aspects.
But who was this team? Was it the members of the Alleanza Nazzjonali Repubblikana, the anti-immigration platform which had now been given safe harbour by the respectability of Dr Josie Muscat and Angelo Xuereb?
They were all there. Joe Meli, the self-declared Mussolini admirer who ran for the Valletta council on a Labour ticket before being shown the door, was busy snapping photographs of the new party. “You should join us,” he told me, grinning. “Because this is a party for real Maltese.” With his black sunglasses, which seemed permanently stuck to his face, and his black shirt and tie, he looked like a character straight out of The Matrix.
“No thanks,” I replied. “I don’t need your sort to make me feel Maltese.” Next to us was Angelo Xuereb, a respectable man now consorting with people with self-avowed fascist sympathies. I asked him whether he felt comfortable with people like Philip Beattie and Paul Salomone, the ANR exponents, and their anti-immigrant platform. “Well, what Beattie said were his personal opinions. We’ll all have to bow our heads to the general ideas of the party,” he answered, offering a hope that the dark side of the people with whom he was associating himself would not overpower his plans for a level-headed compromise.
Martin Degiorgio, another ANR member, was busy filling out a membership form. Along with Joe Meli, he had been part of the Moviment Socjali Repubblikana, a right-wing organisation set up in the mid-1980s and which looked to Almirante’s post-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano as its reference point. Meli himself based the MSR’s manifesto on the document “Il MSI – dalla A alla Z” (The MSI – from A to Z).
This was indeed a tight-knit family. All the admirers of Carmelo Borg Pisani had come out to party. Beneath this veneer of respectability, a pattern of intolerance remains clearly visible. Everyone applauded to old Mintoffian virtues: “Malta l-ewwel u qabel kollox!” With God’s own blessing – “Mulej! Seddaq l-ghaqda fil-Maltin u l-Ghawdxin!” – Josie Muscat was bringing strongman politics back to the fore with his slogan of “Sovereignty, Seriousness, Justice”.
He is out to right all the wrongs, a party for everybody with a grievance: hunters, building contractors (Sandro Chetcuti from the GRTU’s building section was there to applaud the new party), and all those who long for the secure, idealised past which only someone like Josie seems to understand.
Because Josie sure doesn’t understand the present.
mvella@mediatoday.com.mt
|
