Ajma! Jaqq! Istra! and other sounds from the new Labour pépé in the Courage To Vote ad

If Labour’s ‘Courage to Vote’ change-is-nigh electoral ad is to be believed, the middle-class households of the 9th, 10th, and 11th districts are populated by dads reading the Financial Times on their day off.

And they are fighting a new virus: their daughters are threatening to go red and vote Labour, and their hysterical mothers are waxing Menglish about it.

You will have probably watched this video a dozen times on Friday evening during Xarabank, and your reaction to it depends squarely on what your background is. I hail from Sliema (not Windsor Terrace blue, but close enough to Lazy Corner to know another world is out there), and am privy to the prejudices of the class that ‘Courage’ claims to portray. If you’re like me, you will have felt a slight glass-crunching sensation inside the oesophagus.

If, on the other hand, you belong to the class that has nothing to lose but its gaudy chokers and gold chains, you probably found nouveau-Labour-pépé (NLPs) amusing. Maybe you hate the NLPs’ ksuħati, feel patronised and unrepresented by the ad. Quo vadis Lejber, you might think to yourself – ‘I thought we was working class’.

Were you, like me, plunged into some sort of psychological whirlpool at seeing this Joinwell kitchen-sink drama unfolding? Had you already witnessed this kind of play at some family do? Because if you recognised yourself with these ingliżati, then you’re certainly not voting Labour.

For the past two months Labour politicos have been perfecting their English affectations in a bid to charm the Paul & Shark off the Nationalists. Konrad Mizzi chimes in with ‘shame on you, minister Faaahnaach’ while Joseph Muscat always allows a bipartisan 50-50 sprinkling on his soundbites, by saying “li l-pjan tagħna tal-enerġija is credible and we will deliver.”

Has all this silver-tongued electioneering boiled down to this one stereotype? Not the scarf-waving wenches and their floppy-haired boyfriends with dodgy piercings – but brave young men and women brought up in the households where ‘Eddie’ was a byword for saintliness, where they cut their enamelled teeth in the hallowed corridors of the Sacred Heart Convent and St Edward’s College, who use words like ‘ajma’ and ‘jaqq’ when they must be disparaging about ‘you know, hux, that ħamallu.’

So far, so pulit.

Mum attempts to exorcise the Labour out of errant daughter

Eye-rolling sequence #1

... and #2

But this deliberate imagery has come at the expense of the less appealing, roughhewn working class that has been largely absent from both parties’ campaigns (tax cuts for the high earners, remember?). As one friend commented on Facebook, all Labour’s left to do is host a mass meeting in English.

It would seem ‘Courage’ is an appeal to a promising youth vote to ditch its blinkers. Kudos to that. People watching this ad will recognise what is happening in Malta: many former PN voters are going to switch because new Labour is convincing.

But is ‘Courage’ really a call for people to switch party allegiances? Or is Labour simply boasting of its middle-class inroads? A characterisation of Labour’s secret fetish for the middle-class, betraying the working class that always formed its bedrock?

I feel there is a more painful diagnosis to be made.

Politics in Malta has always been more religion than shopping. Morally, the Nationalists are seen as having restored democracy at a time where liberty and freedom of expression were truly at stake, taking Malta into the EU with a modernised economy that moved away from Labour’s self-sufficiency and clunky nationalisation. Eddie Fenech Adami was the guiding light of this vision: free enterprise, European identity, strong government safety nets. These were strong values, not just electoral programmes.

This is where Joseph Muscat reinvented Labour’s extraordinary mission to win government from the ashes of the discredited Sant years: free enterprise for business, a newfound belief in Europe, maintain free education and healthcare, and waging war on the “clique” that Lawrence Gonzi is hostage to. Malta Tagħna Lkoll sounds like an appealing and perhaps convincing package of unifying, patriotic zeal – whether you buy into it, or not. What’s sure is that the Nationalists are not selling it.

So when the young girl declares to her horrified mother that she has switched allegiance, she has not just taken leave of her senses by eloping with the red terror. She is propagating her Nationalist pedigree by refusing her mother’s arranged political marriage. And this freedom is borne of the values Fenech Adami propagated. ‘Courage’ may well be Labour’s invitation to take a bold step, a statement on the changing fabric of Maltese society and the promise that lies in its youth to vote with their minds.

But then again, I still think this ad says something more about Labour itself, than its audience.

‘Mum, I think I’m going into Labour’

Bear with me, as I delve into the biology of ‘Courage to Vote’, because there is something ultimately happening inside the very bodies of these first-time voters, isn’t there?

They are being asked to commit what their Nationalist-worshipping parents might believe is a ‘mortal sin’, taste the forbidden fruit, drop acid, jump on a merchant vessel to the Indian subcontinent… voting Labour.

In the ad, the daughter who will vote Labour shocks her mother (a convincing performance – I’d hazard she votes for Zammit Dimech) but has shaken her dad out of complacency, because he too confides secretly with her that he will go red. It’s like a coming-out drama – ‘Mum, I’m gay! Mum, I’m converting to Islam! Mum, I’m dropping out of law’ – it’s that very bodily experience of confronting parents with the horror of what you are about to declare.

And why should voting Labour even carry such aversion in this household? Why is Labour itself keen to forcefully depict the “courage” and implied horror it takes to vote for them? Should not ‘Courage’ be a positive spin-off from Malta Taghna Lkoll, or does it betray the inferiority with which Labour perceives itself within these bourgeois environs?

On one hand, the advert wears its honesty on its sleeve: vote Labour after 25 years of almost uninterrupted Nationalist government, declaring it publicly under pain of ostracisation, “an act of courage” for PN voters who want buy into Muscat’s aspirational message. But then its earnestness really misfires with the subjects it claims to represent. They might feel mischaracterised as hysterical and dogmatic, rendered ridiculous by the Menglish patois and excessive code-switching (“Se nivvota according to what is right, taf because how you’ve always voted istra”) which is conversely, used by Labour voters to mock ‘Sliema sorts’ as effete, effeminate, well-dressed knobs.

‘Courage’ suggests the PN is bleeding support from pale-blue and true-blue households. But it employs such a brazen stereotype: dad reads the FT, Gianni-like landscapes and objets d’art adorn white-plastered walls, pearl-wearing mum is poring over a laptop and box-file and some papers, suggesting she actually does some brainy pottering of her own.

But ultimately, in eliciting the horrific aversion that voting Labour elicits in ‘Courage mum’, this ad carries with it two fantastic aspects of the horror genre – on one hand, it cautions PN households that they cannot shield their children from voting Labour; on the other, just as we seek out excitement in watching a horror movie, we are called on to seek out Labour as a new thrill that confronts the “dumb reasons” not to vote for them.

In William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, the Macneil household is attacked by a demon once worshipped in the Middle East, taking physical control of the youngest daughter. Its unexplained invitation stuns the atheist family, but ultimately the film warns us that evil can be lurking everywhere. Similarly, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is an aristocratic and culturally savvy vampire who establishes his lairs in upmarket London, and infects women of good standing with his lycanthropic virus. Again, nobody is safe.

So what does the Labour-possessed ‘Courage’ daughter do to us? Does it warn Nationalist voters that their nubile daughters are toying with a Labour vote, threatening the peace inside their conservative, FT-reading households?

Or does it invite them to take a controlled thrill by voting Labour, to confront the anti-Labour prejudice?

The happy ending suggests the latter. ‘Stoic John’ dad seemingly keeps out of the mother-daughter feud. When the daughter tells him she is “happy to be voting Labour”, he gives a furtive look around and then whispers “me too” to the delight of his rebellious offspring – but for Chrissakes, are we about to roll a spliff or exercise our democratic right to vote?

These seem to be the kind of daughters that NLP dads want: party-cide, not patricide.