A corrupt government is like a bad poker player: they always have a ‘tell.’
A ‘tell’ is an unconscious response to a situation – like a good hand in a card game – that gives away the person’s position. A person might smirk if they’re feeling confident. Their brow may furrow if their odds turn sour.
In the case of the Maltese government, it’s how they respond to research about European democracies.
Every year, we are treated to increasingly grim headlines about Malta’s democracy. Just yesterday, the annual Liberties Rule of Law report described Malta’s democracy as “stagnating.”
Two weeks ago, the Safety of Journalists Platform published a report highlighting Europe’s “broad democratic decline.” This decline is directly proportional to the severity of the struggles faced by journalists across the continent. In a panel discussion overshadowed by the spectre of war, Malta still managed to earn a dishonourable mention for its unapologetic failure to address rampant corruption.
Just over a month ago, Malta hit an all-time low on the Corruption Perceptions Index. We are now 65th out of a total of 180 countries and territories across the world.
And yet, in spite of all this detailed research, justice minister Jonathan Attard still strenuously denies that Malta’s democracy is stagnating, all while his boss is busy fending off FOI requests to publish ministers’ assets.
In a press release that reads like a tantrum, the government “categorically rejects” the report. The press release goes out of its way to single out the Daphne Foundation as the local NGO that authored the chapter about Malta. Needless to say, the Daphne Foundation quickly issued a fact-check post to counter the justice minister’s shameless press release.
Nobody can compellingly dispute the notion that Malta is a mafia state. If anything, describing our democracy as “stagnating” is actually a charitable way of putting it.
And yet, our government still thinks that it can shield itself from scrutiny by outrageously denying evidence-based research.
The ‘tell’ is the way they compulsively sneer at the mere suggestion of being held accountable.
From the perspective of a corrupt government, a comprehensive report backed by civil society is relatively easy to swat away.
Bear in mind the government reacts in the same manner to reports authored by independent local institutions like the National Audit Office – ignoring an NGO’s assertions is just another day in Narnia, as far as they’re concerned.
All the government needs to avoid being held accountable by such reports is to enact just enough legislation to have something to point towards when claiming it is reforming the country’s broken justice system.
Avoiding a physical presence that demands your accountability, on the other hand, is more difficult than simply rejecting the findings of a damning report.
That is why the government must commit all of its official and unofficial assets to discrediting critics and their supporting networks.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you are probably aware that our Parliament is absolutely falling apart.
Yesterday, the Opposition walked out of a plenary session. The session was about a government-backed motion to censure opposition MP Karol Aquilina following the Nationalist Party’s statement about the Speaker of the House, Anġlu Farrugia.
Describing the government’s motion as “fascist and vindictive”, the Nationalist Party is publicly putting up a united front. It argues that the government fails to acknowledge its responsibility in the crises that the country is facing. Instead, the government is subverting Parliament’s mechanisms to attack an MP who criticises the government’s track record on corruption while absolving the Speaker from his failures.
Yet again, nobody can dispute the fact that the Speaker of the House is a Labour Party man through and through. The fact is that the Speaker of the House is appointed by a simple majority in Parliament, and Farrugia has been hogging the seat since 2013 purely because the government benefits from his compliance.
In spite of the obviously sorry state our Parliament is in, the Labour Party’s knee-jerk reaction to such assertions is as telling as ever.
In its vitriolic response to the Opposition’s walk out, the Labour Party needled the Nationalist Party about a lack of internal unity and Charles Bonello’s appointment to the role of secretary general.
There are two important layers to decode in all this.
Layer one is the Labour Party’s relentless efforts to specifically portray Karol Aquilina as the “de facto leader” of the Nationalist Party while simultaneously claiming that separate factions within the party disagree on how to react to his behaviour.
The fact is that you can hate Karol Aquilina all you want – the man knows how to play his role in the theatre of Parliament and has proven to be a huge obstacle to the Labour Party’s machinations. The amount of resources being deployed to destroy his reputation is directly proportional to the Labour Party’s increasing inability to cover up its own failures.
The Labour Party cannot afford to deal with a Nationalist Party that fights corruption in the same vein that it tried to do so back when Simon Busuttil was in charge. Try as he might, though, Karol Aquilina on his own cannot break through the miasma of futility that stifles Parliament.
The government attempts to cast the Opposition as irrational and unwilling to follow the proper channels when both parties know that the government’s parliamentary majority gives it the power to steamroll over any kind of challenge that the Opposition can make.
Unless the system is changed, the only thing that the Nationalist Party can really do in Parliament is credibly ride the moral high ground and use Parliament as its staging ground for a wider anti-government campaign.
Which brings us to the second layer in this equation – The Nationalist Party’s failure to stand up to the same degree of scrutiny that it applies to the government. That is, if its pitch as Malta’s only alternative to Labour is to be believed.
As insidious and twisted as the Labour Party’s narrative may be, it is true that there are factions within the Nationalist Party who are covertly waging war with each other. It is also true that, at the behest of its leader, the Opposition undermined its own democratic process by turning a three-person race for secretary general into a fait accompli.
The Nationalist Party cannot ever credibly ride that moral high ground it needs to win over the electorate because its own internal democracy is subject to the diktat of its leader. If its own bigwigs cannot agree on the direction the party should take, then the party is only heading towards another electoral drubbing.
The fact is that the Opposition wants to have its cake and eat it. The Nationalist Party invests political capital in giving the impression that it takes corruption seriously while failing to live up to the kind of transparency that is required to credibly face scrutiny whenever it is called for.
This gives the government the opportunity to turn the party’s weaknesses into propaganda fodder, providing a convenient foil for its own severe shortcomings.
Only the most venally corrupt will stoop to such lows to somehow justify their wrongdoing. But the fact is that we do have a monstrously corrupt government, and it is so afraid of scrutiny that it will stop at nothing to conceal its iniquity.
For Malta to have a credible shot at fighting back, the most virtuous among us must come forward to counter the darkness.
In a country that is run by the corrupt, scrutiny itself has been weaponised, leaving watchdogs in an impossible bind in which they are put under the microscope far more than authorities themselves are.
In this context, anything short of a united front that is as transparent as they come will inevitably lead to more of the same.
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Note to readers: we will be following tonight’s plenary session to bring you a follow-up commentary piece tomorrow morning.