PL - If you can’t beat them, join them

If the PN copied posters and slogans from foreign campaigns (mostly French and American), the Labour Party has adopted an arguably much more bizarre campaign strategy: it has chosen to copy none other than the Nationalist Party itself... while in the same breath arguing that the country needs a change from the same PN it now emulates on so many fronts.

Perhaps it is not quite as blatant an act of plagiarism as that of the PN's campaign pilfering from Obama - in fact you sometimes have to look quite hard to spot the hidden clues. But this week the Labour Party issued an 'manifesto' of its own - which like the PN's is actually a precursor to an as-yet unpublished 'electoral programme'.

Entitled 'A Roadmap for our Country: Guidelines for an Electoral Manifesto' - and replete with the same heavily airbrushed colour images of surprisingly trendy families (complete with compulsory dog) now visible on hundreds of roadside billboards - at moments it reads almost as a compendium of every former Nationalist campaign strategy and slogan ever concocted in the past 30 years... all neatly repackaged and given a glossy New Labour once-over, yes; but otherwise indistinguishable from their original appearances on former Nationalist campaign literature.

For instance: the PL publication enumerates 12 basic points on which the manifesto will be based. These include issues such as economic growth, fiscal diligence, employment, environment, education and all the usual suspects.

And if the accompanying sound-bites and catchphrases sound in any way familiar, it's only because we've heard them all before on literally countless occasions.

On 'work', for instance, Labour promises adequate employment 'biex int tghix ahjar' ('to improve your way of life')... and that, word for word, was the PN's exact campaign slogan ahead of the 1998 election.

The same booklet also promises 'Arja Iktar Nadifa Ghal Uliedna' ('Cleaner air for our children')... which plainly echoes the campaign slogan (and also the accompanying song) for the EU referendum in 2003: 'Ghalik, ghal uliedek', etc.

Add to this the repeated insistence on turns of phrase such as 'biex kulhadd jimxi 'l quddiem' ('so that everyone's quality of life is improved'), and it becomes painstakingly clear that Labour is consciously modelling its current campaign on the past (successful) campaigns of the PN... which by definition is rather incongruous, when you consider that the same Labour Party also argues that the country needs a change precisely from the PN's rather fossilised way of doing politics.

So the question arises as a matter of course: if what the country needs above all other things is change... why is Labour proposing continuity instead? And if the existing government's policies are so flawed that the PL doesn't miss an opportunity to criticise them... why on earth has Labour chosen to imitate the same policies, rather than produce new ones of its own?

Polls apart

As tends to be the case with many other aspects of Labour's campaign, the answer can be found almost exclusively in polls and surveys.

In recent years these have consistently pointed towards a growing disaffection among Nationalists with their own party - a disaffection that the Labour leader (who himself seems to fit the mould of a typical PN politician far more than a typical Labour one) is understandably keen on exploiting to the maximum.

But the same polls also indicate that traditionally Nationalist voters are not necessarily averse to the declared aims or principles of the party that they once supported - and above all, to the sort of rhetoric that categorised the now distant 1980s and 1990s (about which many Nationalists are openly nostalgic).

On the contrary, the same polls that have clearly inspired the PL campaign also suggest that a steady flow of former PN voters may have abandoned the fold precisely because they feel it no longer emblemises those selfsame principles.

Looking again at the rhetoric that Labour has so blatantly lifted from past PN campaigns, and one immediately notes that all such examples are closely associated only with the greatest success stories of the PN: EU membership, the business boom of the early 1990s, and so on.

Surely it will not have been lost on Joseph Muscat that these are the selfsame issues that his own party (including himself, in a not-so distant past that the PL is now desperately trying to put behind it) had fought against so hard and so furiously for so long.

In the case of EU membership it was a deliberate, head-on collision which had left the Labour Party bloodied, bruised and virtually unelectable for years. But in the case of the business-friendly motif embodied by such phrases as 'inhallukhom tahdmu' ('We will let you work unhindered'), the underlying conflict was less immediately conspicuous.

Older incarnations of Labour in the 1970s and early 1980s may not have openly opposed the business class on principle; but they did adopt aggressive policies which had often targeted private industry - policies which permitted the nationalisation of private companies, and which were by and large rooted in a generally anti-privatisation ideology (which, to give it its full due, was generally the norm among old-school socialist parties throughout Europe at the time).

So by inviting today's voters to associate the Labour Party with precisely those aspects of recent history which were actually feathers in the PN's cap - and which Labour had directly or indirectly opposed - Muscat is making a very clear statement of intent.

He is moving (or trying to move) Labour out of the bottomless political quagmire in which it had allowed itself to sink over the past 20 or so years - the doomed anti-EU policy, for instance, or the hangover of the Mintoff/KMB administrations that older Nazzjonalisti still remember with fear and resentment - and repositioning the party to simply 'replace' the PN on its own former soil.

That, at any rate, is what the Labour campaign so far suggests: not just through slogans in booklets and on billboards, but also in the choice of imagery/rhetoric employed by its public spokespersons on practically all issues currently being discussed. (Unlike former PL leaders Muscat does not talk of the 'haddiema' as opposed to the 'barunijiet' - on the contrary, he appeals directly to the middle class).

Yet the most recent example remains by far the most revealing. After years in which expectations were deliberately fanned by the PN media, Labour this week finally unveiled its own proposals for the energy sector.

I won't go into the specifics, because that is catered for elsewhere in this newspaper; but a number of aspects of the presentation immediately leap to the eye, even if they tell us very little about Labour's actual energy-generation plan. The first of these ancillary details is the surprising insistence on semi-privatisation of Enemalta. Labour is in fact proposing to hive off 40% of Malta's energy generation capacity to an as yet unnamed private firm, as part of a fixed-term contract lasting a minimum of 25 years.

Immediately the PN pounced on the implications that Malta would be at the mercy of a foreign private entity for its most basic energy needs - and without entering the merits of the argument either way, this fact alone suggests that the two parties have simply traded places in the last few months.

Labour, which had traditionally opposed privatisation of so many other State entities in the past (Maltapost, Drydocks, MIA, Sea Malta, and many more), is now championing the partial privatisation of what is easily the single most strategic infrastructural node of the entire country. And the PN, which had authored all the above-mentioned privatisation initiatives, now cries blue murder over the same entrepreneurial approach to politics that had once formed part of its own core identity.

But there are other areas and instances were a similar reversal of roles can be discerned. Since taking over at the helm in 2008, Joseph Muscat has systematically jettisoned much that was once part of the Labour Party's DNA: its historic logo, for instance; its anthem, its motto, and other indications of a purely cosmetic make-over.

More recently he took the rather more dramatic decision to axe his deputy leader Anglu Farrugia: whose only apparent crime was to be too reminiscent of Old Labour for its present leader's comfort.

As electoral strategies go, Muscat may even be onto something here: for it is true that polls which have been so reliable in the past now suggest a whole new market of disgruntled pale-blue voters just crying out to be 'converted'. And it is equally true that their foremost concern appears to be a return to the so-called 'bad old days' of 1980s Labour.

Hence the ongoing transformation into something that is in many ways (though to what extent remains to be seen) the opposite of Old Labour. But to renounce one's own past altogether cannot be a risk-free strategy; and for a socialist party in particular, a move from left to right always entails some degree of danger.

Muscat will certainly want to avoid a repeat of the Alfred Sant experience of 1996-98. Like Muscat today, Sant had also tried to reinvent his party's core identity... though he did not do this by simply turning his party into a body-double for the PN.

But times were different then; and Old Labour (then still spearheaded by the formidable Dom Mintoff) proved remarkably reluctant to simply slink off into a corner and die a natural death... and the rest is now history.

Joseph Muscat's ability to avoid the same fate now depends on a number of factors, and not all of them are necessarily in his own control.

The first is a concern that arises from the same polls that inform so much of the PL's electoral strategy. Not all disillusioned Nationalists are aggrieved for the same reason. Some are no doubt irked by the PN's excessively confessional approach to moral matters, culminating in the 2011 divorce referendum (hence Labour's appeal to 'liberals, progressives and moderates'). Others are put off by real or perceived cases of nepotism, cronyism, corruption and so on - hence Labour's repeated mantra of klikkek and korruzzjoni. Others still are resentful of the many unkept promises regarding the environment... and unsurprisingly, Labour now poses as an environmentalist movement. And overriding all these is an arguably much larger category of voter that is simply annoyed because the PN failed to deliver any particular goodies to their own door.

So by adopting all the external trappings of the PN's badge of identity, Muscat may be unwittingly raising the expectations of all those individual categories simultaneously: and he cannot possibly hope to meet them all, seeing as in many cases (environmentalist and business concerns being the most obvious example) the demands themselves are mutually exclusive.

Even if he somehow succeeds in keeping all (or most) of these diverse categories within the expanding fold of this own Labour Party, Muscat will sooner or later be faced with another dilemma: how to handle the inevitable new category of disgruntled Labour voters - some of whom may well be expecting the same flow of goodies to be simply reversed under a Labour administration.

And on a separate level altogether, Muscat will almost certainly face questions of a more overtly ideological nature. Looking back at the commitments his party is currently making - to scale back public spending, for instance; to encourage public-private partnerships, or to reinvent ways of financing Malta's overwhelmingly generous welfare state - and much of what emerges does not quite fall within the traditionally "left" side of the political spectrum at all.

From this perspective, Muscat may well have hit on a promising formula to turn around his party's abject record of electoral failure in the past 30 years. But if he does win the election by transforming his party into a pale shadow of the PN, he may well find himself emulating the PN in other ways too... struggling to keep his own supporters on board throughout his first term, and quite possibly fending off potential backbencher revolts of the kind that characterised the last 18 months of the present government's term.