King of the Hill

I’ve always found the expression ‘level playing field’ to be particularly apt for politics. Not sure about the ‘level’ part, naturally. As games go, this one’s a little like ‘King of the Hill’: the rules actually require one player to be on top of things, while all other contestants engage in a constant uphill struggle to oust the ‘king’ against unlikely odds.

But it is undeniably a game, and this week the two leading contestants on the local playing field gave us all a public demonstration of the rules. First we had Prime Minister Joseph Muscat defending his government’s intention to simply defer local elections, because (apparently) it is not in his team’s interests to allow one third of the electorate to have a say in the administration of their own locality… and this after spending years in opposition criticising the PN government for doing exactly the same thing on numerous occasions.

Next we had PN secretary general Chris Said insisting that the taxpayer simply bail out political parties from the financial mess they themselves created… and this after his party had spent 25 years in power resisting calls for a national law on party financing.

Inherent to both these U-turns is rule number one of the game. What one says in politics depends exclusively on one’s position on the playing field at any given moment. So whatever position or cause any political party will have taken in all those years at the bottom of the hill… well, don’t pay it too much mind.

You can rest assured that the same party will say the clean opposite things the moment it is in power. And not only will it seem oblivious to the contradiction… but it will also expect the rest of us to develop instant amnesia as well, and to simply forget everything it ever said or did in the past.

Let’s start with Muscat and the vanishing local council elections. We have just discovered – accidentally, please note – that his government intends to cancel the 2015 local elections. But it has nothing to do with the spring hunting referendum, Muscat told us. Whatever gave us all that bizarre impression, anyway?

Naturally, I expected Joseph Muscat to move on to phase two of that explanation… which would be to explain exactly why – if it has nothing to do with the spring hunting referendum – his government is suddenly so averse to the idea of local elections being held next year.

So tell us, Dr Muscat. What’s the reason? Or does he think that elections are inconveniences that can simply be cancelled at will by the ruling administration, with no explanation given at all?

I guess we will never know, because instead of a lucid and coherent explanation of its intentions, all we got from the government was a reminder of how often the Nationalist administration had postponed local elections when the shoe was on the other foot

And this, I fear, is getting to be the most tiresome, irritating and repetitive mantra of the present government. You can’t criticise us for X, Y, Z, because the PN also did X, Y and Z when in power.

Conveniently, Muscat chooses to ignore two small details. One, some of us out here – admittedly not everyone, at least in the media – also criticised the Nationalists for X, Y, and Z… so quite frankly the “they-did-it-too” excuse does not and cannot be expected to wash.

This is because the rules of the political game do not apply to the ordinary man in the street. They apply only to the political parties themselves, and to those media commentators who are still (incredibly) so very blinkered that they still seem to see one party as somehow intrinsically superior to the other… in stubborn defiance of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

But as far as the more discerning voter is concerned, it matters not a jot that the PN was guilty of the same or worse in the past. That is irrelevant. Taking into account the result of the March 2013 election, the only conclusion possible is that X, Y and Z will not be tolerated regardless of which party it comes from. And what happened in March 2013 can happen again (unless, of course, Joseph Muscat intends to cancel national elections, too).

The other tiny detail Muscat appears to have forgotten is that his own party, with himself as leader, had cried foul each and every single time this was done before.

In 2005, for instance, the PN withdrew its candidates from the Zejtun and Marsa local elections at the eleventh hour, in an explicit bid to avoid electoral defeat by simply ensuring that no election would take place at all. Muscat was not yet PL leader at the time, but that didn’t stop him from criticising the decision several years later, when his own party faced a similar situation in the Sliema council.

This is how it was reported in February 2012: “We could do like GonziPN and play democratic games during upcoming local council elections like the Nationalists in Marsa and Zejtun by withdrawing candidates to cancel elections from occurring and gaining a majority. We can play these games, but we don’t play games, we respect the people,” Muscat said. 

But, oh, look: just three years leader – with the same Muscat now Prime Minister – he has suddenly revised his earlier opinion about cancelling elections for private, partisan reasons. Not only is he now planning to pull the same stunt that he himself had criticised so harshly in 2012… but (unlike the Nationalists, who at least admitted it was an ‘intelligent – ahem – strategy’)… he seems to think that no explanation is even required. And of course, that is how GonziPN used to react to endless criticism over all sorts of analogous issues.

So who’s King of the Hill now, aye?

Meanwhile, thanks to Chris Said, we also got a timely reminder (if any were needed) that the PN has also had to readjust its gameplay strategy, now that it is no longer lording it like the proverbial cock that crows from the summit of a garbage heap.

Suddenly, the party that for years behaved as if it were deep in the pockets of Malta’s business community has developed a deep-rooted aversion to the idea that political parties may be held hostage to arcane commercial interests.

So the opposition is now in favour of state funding of political parties to ensure that “parties are not held hostage by the vested interests of the few” and because political parties needed to be in a strong position to “be the voice of the people.” 

Strange, isn’t it, that the PN has come round to this way of thinking only now… and not at any point when it was in government, and could therefore have passed a party financing law of its own (as it had been endlessly urged to do by the PL, AD, and practically every voice in the entire country). But then again, losing one’s position as King of the Hill entails more than just the loss of power. It also entails the loss of leverage with the same commercial interests Chris Said seems to suddenly be so worried about.

Without your finger on the big red button, it is quite simply impossible to turn to building contractors and big businesses for donations – or interest-free loans, if you prefer – on the understanding that the investment will eventually pay off in kind. So how else to shore up your party’s state of bankruptcy? Simple: you just turn to the taxpayer and present him or her with the bill for all your party’s unpaid debts. What else?

This might explain why the PN never felt the need to ensure a level-playing field so long as it had its finger on that button, and money literally wasn’t a problem. It might also explain why it now champions (rather hysterically) an issue that it had simply swept under the carpet for more than two decades.

And just like Labour and Joseph Muscat, Said seems incapable of seeing a glaring contradiction that is conspicuously visible to anyone else. He seems to expect us to agree with him on the need for a ‘level-playing field’, when the government he once formed part of did everything in its power to ensure that the playing field remained as non-level as possible.

Ah, but that was when the PN was still King of the Hill. Only now, it seems, has it finally dawned on the same PN that it can never realistically expect to be king of that hill again, unless it sorts out its financial mess first… which might be slightly difficult, without the possibility of a State bail-out of the kind its secretary-general is so clearly angling for.

All of which raises the question. Does the electorate mind forking out money of its own, so that political parties can continue playing their own little games at everybody else’s expense?

No, I didn’t think so either…