Well, well, well – here we are again.
One good way of being able to tell general elections are somewhere around the corner is to look at the type, quality, and frequency of government press releases.
The five DOI photos I used in the featured collage for this commentary piece fit the bill perfectly. All of them were published in press releases issued by the government in the past few days.
If you read the news regularly, you’re probably all too familiar with what I’m talking about. You know the type: photos of the ‘ministers pointing at things’ variety.
The minute you start seeing a sudden surge of bland, staged photo ops in which everybody looks like they’d rather be anywhere else is the minute you know what’s coming.
Wave after wave of ‘positive’ announcements, all spoken with the kind of zeal that would make a televangelist seem like a tame salesman in comparison. During last year’s local councils/MEP elections, we published a detailed investigation documenting this same, exact pattern.
This, considered alongside the mushrooming of mostly illegal propaganda billboards bearing meaningless slogans, all points towards the dreaded possibility of an electoral race coming soon to an island near you.
All in all, it seems like the government is merrily laying the groundwork for prime minister Robert Abela to follow through with his threats.
No sniveling coward of that calibre could possibly resist the temptation to shaft the Nationalist Party shortly after an embarrassing leadership election. Easy wins will always appeal to someone who knows they wouldn’t be able to hack it otherwise.
And so, here we are, midway through a blistering heatwave, listening to the rumblings of unhappy general elections that nobody seems to even care about.
On the one hand, we have a government that has no real reason to fear its political adversaries, largely because it has mastered the use of systemic corruption as a means of securing its incumbency.
On the other, we have a Nationalist Party that is about as inspiring as a forgotten pack of biscuits gathering dust in a humid cupboard.
With these kinds of tribes, who needs enemies?
There are, of course, the alternatives hungrily vying for a seat at the table.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am yet to properly sit down for a chat with smaller political parties like ADPD and Momentum, so I cannot pass judgement with any measure of reliable confidence. Having said that, the leading members of these parties are known quantities, and so far, political surveys and last year’s elections show that voters are yet to take them seriously.
I invite any of these parties to reach out if they wish to send a representative for a full-length interview. I’d be happy to pick your brains about how you plan on overcoming the major obstacles that stand between you and Parliament.
Open invites aside – where does all this leave us, the 100,000+ people who feel that the major parties are past their expiry date and have nothing to offer for the perilous future that is unfolding across the globe?
Well, let’s just say that we’re going about it with the same level of hubris as the guy who will be forever remembered as being responsible for “the OceanGate disaster.”
Stay humble. Photo: United States Coast Guard
Here we are, in a country that’s loaded with suspicious money, transforming our environment into an extension of our deranged power fantasies and selling off our soul bit by bit, disregarding all sound advice in favour of the ringing clamour of cash registers and a delusional belief in our own infallibility.
The hard-nosed truth is that Malta is a playground for the wealthy and a miserable, cramped prison yard fight for everyone else. No amount of photos of men wearing suits and shaking hands ad eternum can ever make up for that.
The government can abuse its incumbency as much as it wants (it most certainly will) – the reality is that unsustainable policies will always come back to bite you in the arse in the end, and the resulting drain of talent and resources eventually catches up to you in the form of a recession that is both material and moral in nature.
It’s really hard to avoid succumbing to the belief that we are simply done for. By far the most common talking points I hear about the state of the nation all consist of a variation of that sentiment, the notion that there is so much collective apathy and disinterest that one can hardly do any more than just watch helplessly as our quality of life declines dramatically.
I am willing to bet that most of the people who read this website can, at the very least, wrap their heads around the idea that this is a vicious cycle. It’s the moral equivalent of watching a house burn down and declining to rescue anyone trapped inside because well, it’s already burning, so what’s the point in even trying?
We can do better than that. We deserve better than that.
And before anyone comes at me with any bullshit about how people get the government they deserve, I’ll say that is not true, and history has always proven otherwise.
People get the government they fight for. The Labour Party managed to sell off the whole country because they’ve worked at it like mad bastards. They had a plan to rob us all blind and they continue to fight bitterly every day to ensure they can keep stealing from us.
They are fighting you everyday. What are you going to do about it?