When the shoe is on the other foot

In 1996, Opposition leader Alfred Sant rode to electoral victory on a charger named reconciliation. His battle-cry? ‘Min mhux kontra taghna, huwa maghna’ (He who is not against us, is with us).

The slogan may have been convoluted, but the intended message was painstakingly clear. By turning Dom Mintoff’s classic 1970s leitmotif on its head, Sant signalled a change in leadership style for the Labour Party that would successfully reach across the political divide, and appeal to a crucial voter segment that had been pushed to the Nationalist fold precisely by Mintoff’s irascibility.

Judging by the election result, Sant convinced many that he would not be ‘another Mintoff’, and that his New Labour (which at the time harped much on ‘social alliances’) would be less inimical and more inclusive than the ‘old’ one it sought to replace.

But two years later, a very different message rang out from Sant: now once again in opposition after the spontaneous combustion of his government in September 1998. Rejected by the electorate, and undone by the same Mintoff whom he had earlier disavowed, Sant now declared “war, war, war” on the Nationalist Party – marking a return to the traditional formula of political divisiveness which no future political leader, either PN and PL, has departed from since.

This double turnaround delineates a clearly defined pattern behind the choice of rhetoric among Malta’s political leaders. And a remarkably consistent pattern it has proved over the decades, too.

For there was more than just 20 years separating the two Labour leaders – Sant and Mintoff – when they made their diametrically opposing declarations. They were also at pivotally different moments in their careers. 

In the days when he would bellow ‘Min mhux maghna kontra taghna’ at mass meetings, Mintoff was Prime Minister at the height of his power, after a long and battle-fraught career. Sant, on the other hand, was newly elected Opposition leader: a relatively unknown quantity seeking to rebuild his battered and bruised party after suffering its most humiliating defeat ever.

The resulting paradigm is uncomfortable for those who genuinely yearn for a more inclusive, less confrontational political future. For it seems that ‘national reconciliation’ is something routinely promised by parties only when in opposition; but never actually delivered when in government. by which time ‘reconciliation’, so valuable a tool with which to win elections, becomes the very opposite of what it takes to retain power.

Reversal of roles

If Sant took long to realise that Opposition and Government leadership require different skills, the same cannot really be said for Eddie Fenech Adami: a man whose rhetoric was so dissimilar in those two roles, that with hindsight one can almost talk of two completely different people.

The first was Eddie the charismatic resistance leader, whose image on a truck at Tal-Barrani is still evoked each time the PN needs to engender an instant sense of unity and purpose among its followers. The most recent example was last month’s Independence Day mass meeting, when Prime Minister Gonzi was introduced to the tune of Europe’s The Final Countdown – the anthem of the 1987 election, and for many Nationalists the soundtrack of their party’s most glorious moment – and then went miles out of his way to repeatedly chime his predecessor’s name, to tremendous applause from the crowd.

Pre-1987 Eddie was in fact inspirational on many counts. He was the architect of the parliamentary boycott of 1981, the boycott of Xandir Malta (now TVM), and an election campaign that lasted six years… all of which compounded his reputation as a freedom fighter under the slogan ‘Xoghol, Gustizzja, Liberta’.

But a glance at the 1987 PN manifesto reveals also a long-forgotten promise of national reconciliation, this time framed in idyllic and almost fairy-tale terms: “that the Maltese will live together again like brothers.”

As always, it was the party in opposition that talked of building bridges. The party in government seemed more intent on burning such bridges down. Mintoff’s response (and later Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici’s) was to ridicule Eddie and his manifesto as an untried, untested, inexperienced and generally unsafe bet… while all the while whipping up mistrust and hatred for the opposition, largely through references to the past (namely, the Interdett of the 1960s).

Cartoons in Labour-friendly media at the time routinely portrayed the Opposition leader as a baby in a nappy… while skinned rabbits became regular features at Labour mass meetings. Elsewhere, Eddie was reduced to a shadowy, nameless figure on the national news… while hatred directed against him from the podium at mass meetings often resulted in violence and mayhem, sometimes with fatal results.

Once the shoe was on the other foot the Nationalist Party was quick to turn the tables altogether. It is hard to imagine that only a few years after the 1987 election, the same Eddie Fenech Adami who had earlier promised ‘brotherly love’ among all the Maltese would emerge from the law courts shouting “fejn huma l-Laburisti?” – but one external symptom of the ‘us and them’ mentality he had inherited, possibly without realising it, directly from Mintoff.

By the time of the 1996 election – characterised by billboards portraying Alfred Sant as an untried, untested and generally unsafe option who ‘could not be trusted’ – the reversal was complete. Brotherly reconciliation was dead and buried (in fact it featured nowhere on the PN’s manifesto) leaving Sant to woo the disaffected as best he could, thus starting the whole process again.

New ways, old ways

If there was any variation to this ongoing theme, it was introduced by current Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi in 2004. 

Unlike both Eddie and Sant, Gonzi made his ‘reconciliation’ overtures, not as opposition leader, but when voted in as party leader (and de facto PM). Immediately upon winning that contest he promised a ‘new way of doing politics’ – though going on his subsequent eight years in power, it is hard to pin-point exactly what he had in mind. 

One possibility is that Gonzi was responding to a ‘new’ phenomenon the PN had to deal with at the time: disaffection among a segment of its own support base, which had started to do what was previously unthinkable under Eddie (and arguably impossible under Mintoff): i.e., publicly criticise their own party and its leader.

Hence the need to project a reconciliation mentality when in government: a ploy which can be seen to have worked in 2008 – though there were admittedly other factors contributing to that result.

Either way, the recipe for electoral success that Fenech Adami had so thoroughly understood and perfected – and Gonzi seems to only now be taking on board – is one which balances the two opposing forces underpinning the Maltese psyche: a subconscious yearning for reconciliation and change, pitted against the gladiatorial bloodlust of a tribalism built on visceral hatred.

Today’s opposition leader Joseph Muscat has arguably understood this, and with an election in the offing the pattern seems to have reverted along traditional lines. In his determination not to repeat his predecessor’s mistakes, Muscat was quick to reinstate names once associated with the Mintoff years – Alex Sciberras Trigona, Karmenu Vella, and to a lesser extent Anglu Farrugia and Toni Abela – thereby appealing to the lost sense of ‘militancy’ recently decried by historian Dominic Fenech as Labour’s ‘missing link’.

But like Sant and Eddie before him, he will surely have realised that in a two-horse race – often as not decided by little more than 1,000 votes – the victorious party is the one that successfully projects reassurance and peace of mind.

This might explain a certain reluctance on the part of Labour to go on the offensive. With the exception of sporadic statements calling for Austin Gatt’s resignation, the PL has in fact been curiously absent from political engagement of any kind.

Not so the PN, whose leader was last heard literally shouting himself hoarse on the Fossos… and whose growing family of media dependents routinely lash out at anyone who even remotely criticises himself, his policies or his government.

Admittedly it is improbable that the undisguised appeal to mass hatred will result in the same kind of violence we saw in the 1980s – but if the pattern holds good, we shall certainly see an increase in hostility from government-sympathetic quarters, while the opposition will bend over backwards to project a future end to political division, or at least a temporary ceasefire.

After all, they are tactics that have worked well in the past… time and time again.

This story first appeared in MaltaToday on Sunday.