2013: The year Disney’s ‘Frozen’ came out. And Muscat’s infamous 40k win

What are we skinning? The ten-year anniversary of Labour’s ascension into power at the fateful elections in March 2013.

Why are we skinning it? Only because it commemorates the most significant shift in Malta’s political hegemony after a quarter-century rule by the Nationalist Party...

Ten years, huh? Yep, a decade of ‘taghna lkoll’.

Do you feel included in that mix? Of course I’m included. We all are. Whether we like it or not is another matter entirely, though.

Gosh, between one political scandal over another and a pandemic in between, it feels like a lifetime. Nothing makes the time fly by like epochal historical events happening around you while you’re eating breakfast, stuck in traffic or waiting in line for your turn at the supermarket till.

Now that I look back on it, 2013 was also the year Disney’s ‘Frozen’ came out. And that would have been the only significant development that year were it not for the brazen success of the Muscat administration’s infamous 40k win.

Yes, the electorate finally told the PN to ‘let it go’, and that was that. It feels as though that seems to still be the reverberating imprection from even those most sympathetic to the Nationalist cause...

How do you mean? While Labour’s turbulent and troubled decade left countless scars in its wake – both for the country in general and the party in particular – its majority continues to reign on virtually unchallenged by dint of the PN being stuck on old, broken-record preoccupations.

But the Vitals/Steward scandal was uncovered through the efforts of a PN MP... And I would argue that that’s the exception which proves the rule. The PN could have targeted Labour’s concrete (pun intended), specific and material shortcomings for quite some time, in favour of campaigning on moralistic abstractions, and cleaving to the antiquated and extreme elements of their conservative legacy.

Ah well, I guess we’ll have to lean back on civil society to do the work of resisting government. That places an unfair burden on what is essentially a group of voluntary organisations which could eventually be worn down. We need a dedicated Opposition that convincingly takes the government to task, and at the very least ensures that the better angels of the Labour legacy prevail over the worst of its misguided excesses.

The thing is, when we’re talking about Labour’s decade here, we’re mainly talking about Muscat... In many ways, it feels like the adrenaline surge of the Muscat administration has now – perhaps inevitably – given way to the hangover management phase that has fallen on Abela and cabinet.

And who better to cure a hangover than a former bodybuilder, right? No amount of proverbial protein shakes will wash away Abela’s promise of serving as a ‘continuity’ candidate for the Muscat legacy, though.

To say nothing of his key role as Muscat’s former legal advisor. Indeed, it is Deputy Prime Minister Chris Fearne who appeared to offer both a clean break from the Muscat era, and a return to an old-school Labour Party free from fevered fantasies of a Dubai in the Mediterranean.

That seems off the cards for Abela as well, though. The pandemic and the war against Ukraine would have thrown a wrench into the plan anyway. Neither has Abela publically distanced himself from the Muscat legacy, and he insists on safeguarding the top-of-the-food-chain status quo of the construction industry, for example.

So can we look forward to a decade of ‘more of the same’, then? We seem to be cursed to live interesting times, so a point-by-point repeat of the PN years is unlikely.

More’s the pity. Yeah. Would have loved to see what Labour’s equivalent of the ‘arlogg tal-lira’ incident would have been.

Going by their established metrics – i.e., a preponderance for nouveau riche excesses – the illegal construction of a golden clocktower on ODZ doesn’t seem too much of a stretch. L-Aqwa Zmien, indeed.

Do say: ”It’s trite to simply say that the Labour government’s return to power could be characterised as ‘both good and bad’. What it heralded was an irreversible change in the country’s political, economic, and cultural fabric. While for the most part it seems to have enacted the projected desires of its electorate, neither is the dubious genie of some of its more narcotic tendencies going back into the bottle ever again... for better or for worse.”

Don’t say: ”The oil scandal rocked the Nationalist administration 25 years into their legislature... Labour managed to pack in roughly half a dozen of the things in a mere decade. That’s what I call ‘getting things done’!”