Promising heaven on the road to hell

When the general election was called, I promised myself to keep my moaning to my safe space on social media.

Yet, as I follow from a distance, my hypertension keeps increasing, particularly when listening to and watching characters who should know and say better. The more I hear about this and that, the more I feel increasingly disturbed and worried. The Labour Party and the Nationalist Party are indeed promising heaven on earth. But alas, the road they are travelling could well take Malta to hell.

Telebejgħ politics

Insofar as the adage goes, the main tenor of the two parties is that “all will be well”. So, it’s not surprising that anything imaginable is being promised, often without real costing.

Listening to economist Marisa Xuereb in conversation with Jon Mallia, on 13 May 2026, should be enough to get one thinking, if not worrying, that there’s trouble in store. Yet no one seems to care.

Managerial and catchall politics reign supreme, and as long as the Maltese economy is sustained by subsidies and short-term measures, we are told that everything will be OK. I take it that Xuereb’s extensive experience doesn’t count much for those who have full faith in their tribal leaders.

While they bicker, Labour and the Nationalists assume that the economic model which they took in turns to cultivate and grow since the 1980s is here to stay. In substance, their manifestos look like a shopping catalogue. Citizens are clearly treated as consumers with a vote to trade in. The vote is now a sales voucher with a promise printed on the front.

This explains why governments now take a “customer care” approach, and with telebejgħ firmly established in the Maltese imaginary, no one is surprised by how, come election-time, one’s phone flares up with a bonanza of special discounts and offers. No wonder this aspect of Maltese politicking has become the butt of many jokes in popular discourse.

Buy now pay later

This approach reminds me of another phrase used in shopping: “Buy now, pay later”. Even the rate of interest is of no concern. We are promised that the young may not even have to pay taxes in the first five years, the most productive of their career.

Given that Malta relies on a national pension scheme, the older generation is mostly superannuated by the younger work force. But that seems to be less important at this point. The same goes with most promises. In the future, we are told, there will be enough to cover late payments.

Those of my age will remember Arthur Daley, that shifty character played by the late George Cole in the British TV series Minder (ITV 1979-1994) who used to sell any sort of dubious merchandise to his customers. When stuff did not work, he had his minder (played by a young Dennis Waterman) to sort things out. One wonders who will act as Minder in Malta’s future economy.

Blame the foreigner

As if such shenanigans were not enough, the Maltese have now entered a new phase in their political imaginary.

Given that political party clubs are no longer ransacked or burned down, party grandees are patting each other on the back and reassuring us all by how the Maltese electorate has “matured”. This time round, they are not even accusing each other of corruption.

Yet far from gone, the habit of tribal othering has evolved. Instead of directly blaming each other, Labour and the Nationalists are doing so through others. In their slick campaigns, they discovered a convenient and far more effective form of othering—blame the foreigner.

It seems to have started with a Labour candidate who happened to profess Islam as his religion. Hell broke loose in the ranks. Yet both dear leaders made sure that they say enough without upsetting the nativist apple cart from which, as it happens, they have been selling their wares for many years.

Of course, this candidate might be Muslim, we were told by the Labour leadership. But there were several caveats. So, all his personal life was made public from his children’s baptism, his family, his parents, his own life history, and anything there was to say about him without any regard to personal privacy. In the meantime, after being prompted to say something by a journalist, the Nationalist leader reiterated that he and his party are not racist. End of story!

A race to the bottom

That was only the start. The foreigner had to be on the agenda. Reels of candidates barking about foreign labour are now shared online. Clearly, these rants against foreigners were aimed at the party opposite—in this case, Labour. The accusation is that foreigners are now blocking queues in hospitals and everywhere else. On the byword of over-population, which would even make Thomas Malthus cringe, we are told that while it is “not racist to say so”, the nativist argument distinguishing between “Maltese” and “foreign” patients in polyclinics is “valid”.

In full customer care discourse, the nativist argument is even costed. While a few years ago we have been reminded (and rightly so) that foreign labour brings up to and beyond €2 billion, the same voices—this time from the Labour front—want to reassure the nativists amidst their electorate that in line with (reactionary) governments sprouting up in Europe, including Scandinavia, it is “the norm” to get workers to wait for five years to get any benefits while they are still paying taxes and NI, and contributing billions of euros to the economy. These “socialist” paladins even went out of their way to show how this exclusion could be done legally.

This is where the spin of customer care takes a nasty turn. For a long time now, none of those leading the PL and PN have ever taken clear leadership against nativism, just as no leader ever dares to say that racists have no place in their party.

Let’s not forget that nativism and xenophobia are not just opinions. They are morally abhorrent and cannot be tolerated in political discourse. What beggars belief is how anyone aspiring to run a democracy couldn’t see how avoiding saying so and take a stand, they will have to face this cataclysm in the near future.

But hey, you can always buy now and pay later! And who gives a fiddlestick if by then it would be all too late because society will be in hell?