Why is Muscat preaching to the converted?

It was with a great sense of relief that I recently read that for the first time in several years, during 2016 we will not be subjected to any election campaigning whatsoever: no local council elections, no referenda, nothing. Thank you for small mercies.

Which is why I found the whole point of Muscat’s New Year’s Day video so perplexing. Just who was all this hyping up of the Labour Government’s achievements intended for? Who was it targeting? As Mark Anthony Falzon so succinctly put it in his column yesterday in The Sunday Times, “the Prime Minister seems to have no sense of occasion”. That’s just it: there is a time and place for these type of things, which is during an election campaign, but certainly not on New Year’s day when you are supposed to be addressing the nation as a whole and trying to blur the sharp, jagged lines of division so that we can try and pretend we are one united country, at least for the first day of the year.

But what I saw (when I finally forced myself to sit through it) was a clumsy, rather ham-fisted production starring Muscat in which he blew his own trumpet and patted himself on the back for Malta’s current strong economy. Let us set aside for the moment the blatant contradiction of the couple used in the video who, as it turns out, are not your “average-struggling-to-make-ends meet-just-married-couple” after all, but happen to come from a comfortably-off business family. Let us also set aside the fact that, as pointed out by Savior Balzan yesterday in this paper, “Muscat measures success solely according to the financial wellbeing of a person…”

My question as I steeled myself to watch it was – who, exactly, was Muscat trying to convince? It certainly did not convince me. There was not even a sign that whoever came up with this idea was trying to transmit the “feel good factor” in the country using subtle, subliminal messages; it was more like a forceful, sledgehammer blow on the head. Sometimes I wish I could speak to the people who have these brainwaves, sit them down, and ask them, in all honesty, “what were you thinking? “what were you hoping to achieve?”

As public relations and communication strategies go, it was a bizarre decision, not only because it was inappropriate for this time of year, but also because when things are going so well on the economic front (as, admittedly, they are) you do not need to come up with this kind of propaganda exercise. My only conclusion is that if the PM feels the need to keep emphasizing how many great things he has done, it can only be because he is aware that his popularity has slipped on several other fronts, and he needs to keep reminding the electorate that they’ve never had it so good.

I cannot help but draw parallels with Gonzi’s last few, desperate months in office when the tide of public opinion was so clearly against his government, and of how he kept lamenting that people were not “grateful” for all the good things a PN government had done. Ironically, Muscat seems to be reaching this point at a much quicker rate, but instead of taking stock and asking himself why (and actually listening to the answers rather than sweeping them under the carpet), his idea (or the idea of his advisors) is to come up with this stilted, completely unrealistic conversation with an obviously nervous, inarticulate man and his wife, in a designer kitchen which looks like it has never been used.

Or maybe they just filmed the whole thing in an actual showroom. In any case, these “let’s film the Prime Minister with a real life couple in their home” stunts never really work and are just ripe for mockery unless they are handled with a great attention to detail and everyone involved is at ease and speaks naturally. Above all, they really do have to be genuinely ordinary people especially in Malta where two clicks on Facebook can tell you all you need to know.

As for those reading this and saying, “but other politicians in other countries do this”, my answer is yes, but it’s only during an election campaign. Prime Minister David Cameron and his wife Samantha visited several families during their last campaign, to plug the Government’s Help To Buy scheme. So unless Muscat knows something we don’t know, he is at least two years too early to start marketing his party for the 2018 elections.

Those who will lap up this video are those who really do not need any convincing - that demographic of upwardly mobile staunchly Labour-voting families who may or may not come from a working class background, but who have decidedly middle class aspirations, the symbol of which is epitomized by that all-important designer kitchen. Of course there is nothing wrong with having aspirations, may I hasten to add, but where I think we are stumbling up the wrong path is when THAT becomes the only raison d’être of our lives.

Muscat’s Labour party, so different from his predecessors that it is practically unrecognizable, has tapped into this specific psyche of a large sector of the Maltese population, which lives to shop and loves to spend. And because the economy is doing well, and people have money in their pockets (which is, to put it bluntly, the only thing many people care about), it can be argued that this endless cycle of consumption, new shopping malls and spending sprees means everything is hunky dory because it signifies that Malta is booming.

At one point the PM refers to those who “are not happy with Malta’s progress”. But what Muscat is failing to see, is that those who were not impressed with that video are not just PN supporters who will predictably never agree with this government no matter what it does, but also non-blinkered voters for whom a good quality of life is represented by fairness and justice, where enforcement of the rule of law is taken seriously, led by a government which does everything above board and by the book and which respects their intelligence by not saying one thing and doing another.

Ultimately, when it comes to the crunch, these are far more important things in life than merely having the latest designer kitchen.