J’accuse: Votes, Smiles and Tears

This article appears in today’s Independent on Sunday. “Comment is Free”.

Election time is a hot period in any country (well maybe not any – in Luxembourg the only event which seems to excite the locals is the Duke’s birthday) but I believe there are few countries who register such an intense, fiery debate every time that the people are called to decide.

Anxiety in the run-up moves into heated and sometimes bitter exchanges during a short campaign to be followed by tension until the results are announced.  The culmination point is reached in a collective outburst of emotion that would be more fitting in a sporting scenario. As you read this a substantial part of the nation is coiled up on the starting blocks waiting for the starting gun to be fired. The rumours machine and the grapevines will have been working incessantly ever since the first seals on the ballot boxes are broken and the present day augurs take the auspices by reading the will of the people.

Only that the will of the people is not divined from the flight of the few birds spared the annual shooting spree (EU permitting of course) but from the vote of the people that will hail another government for the people by the people. The result is announced and Bang! the collective anxiety is released. Some will sprint off from the starting blocks clad in their party paraphernalia and indulge in two days of merrymaking while others will retreat aghast to their home and imagine a world of doom and gloom for the next years to come.

Why do we not see anything wrong in this picture that I have just painted? How is it possible that we have numbed to accept this state of affairs 4 years after we achieved the step forward of joining the European Union? Did not people hope that tense elections as a matter of life or death would be archived in the annals of history?

I may have posed the question before but this time round there is hope because the answer does not seem to be the same any longer.

The Disaffected Disenfranchised

The stakes in the election were once again what they seem to have been since 1996. Pot and kettle politics of the worst kind in which manifestos and policies played second fiddle to scandals and electioneering tactics masterminded by electoral teams in Pieta and Hamrun. No change there. Not only did the major parties ignore any possibility of change in this respect but they seemed determined to maintain the status quo by muffling any possible switch in style. –more of that later.

The difference in this election is that, for the first time in a General Election, the disjointed voice of the disenchanted has been loud and clear for anybody willing to listen. For the first time at least one of the main parties has had to address the disillusioned voters directly. By disillusioned I do not mean the disgruntled (yes I am aware that I will shortly break the record for usage of the “dis-” prefix – all this dissing I say) voters who regularly use their vote in some sort of protest. Notwithstanding the efforts of one party to class all hesitating voters in one basket it was clear that the need for a change in the daily politics was high on many a voter’s agenda.

It was difficult to perceive this disenchantment in the midst of the usual crossfire. The language and mentality of our politics made progress on that level of debate all the more difficult. We have been brought up in a society where if you criticise one side then you obviously have an agenda for the other. Assessments or judgements can no longer be made objectively because a partisan implication will always be imputed to them come what may. This may have a huge part in explaining the dearth of so-called “intellectuals” in our country. Free thinking individuals have long preferred silence to the pummelling and labelling by the established politikanti.

The voters who wanted to vote for real change had a tough time this time round. They wanted to vote in a new era of representation that they believed would herald a different style of debate for the common good. They came to the election full of expectation – that the “Malta in the EU” era had begun to bear its fruits and that this first election without a major do-or-die issue would be their first chance to value programs and go beyond the black or white choice.

The Establishment (a.k.a. MLPN)

The established parties had other things in mind though. They too had had time to grasp the moment and present the people with a new, calmer state of affairs by presenting two well-researched manifestos that would clearly show a commitment to the common good. Alas the manifestos were doomed from the start. The pollsters and marketing teams in both parties got the upper hand at the word go. The parties showed once again that the most valued weapons in their arsenal were not ideas built on bottom-up political dialogue over the last years but the media machines they so efficiently master coupled with scandals on one side and character assassination on the other.

You could play the blame game. It’s a subjective exercise. Is the Labour party to blame for choosing to persevere on a tried and tested route? Is it to blame for once again building its electoral capital on the disgruntled and the need for change for the sake of it? Is it to blame for lazily choosing the easy way out and focusing on tinkering with the economic path that has been painfully constructed simply to amuse the easily baited with a few promises that would mean having to come up with alternative ways of ensuring that the nation’s coffers remain unharmed?

Is the Nationalist party to blame for focusing its campaign on one leader and obliterating a whole group of people as though Malta’s success or failure depends on one man? Is it to blame for appropriating the sad anomaly of the “Wasted Vote” for its own ends? Is it to blame for having admitted that the current electoral system allows a situation where many votes can go to waste and choosing to capitalise on this situation? Is the Nationalist party to blame for a hate campaign against those who spoke about the “Third Way” equating them to traitors and irresponsible voters?

From my personal, biased perspective it all started to go wrong when the Labour party went for Alfred Sant. Not Alfred Sant the man who, I am sure, has his good intentions whenever he ventures into politics but Alfred Sant and what he stands for. This implied clearly that Labour would be going for the minimal-effort campaign – one that counts on the age-old formula of Change for the Sake of Change. Labour reneged on its responsibility as an opposition to take the baton of change in hand and really be a new alternative – a Blairite model if need be. Instead we had the courting of the mass of voters who would want change either out of spite or to keep the things running the same way but at least with their party out on top. It’s the motivation of both the party and the voters that I seriously question. Even the loud shouts of corruption which would have been a strong enough complement to a real politic of change were relegated to convenient tools to spur on the bus of cosmetic alternation.

What about the Nationalist Party? They fell for the bait hook, line and sinker. As a government in power for practically 20 years they knew that the wave of disgruntled voters (the ones who vote out of spite) added on to the immovable mass of diehards could only mean that once again a party in government could be ruled out by the floaters of the Change for Change kind. What they do not seem to have understood at first is that these were not the only voters concerned. The disaffected disenfranchised I have described above had also reached a point of critical mass. By the time Saliba’s cohorts noticed this it was too late. The party spin had been woven around one underlying theme that would have to be pummelled into the electorate’s mind come what may: Ma tistax tafdah (You cannot trust him). Ironically for a party warning the electorate not to turn the clock back to 1996 it seemed to be doing most of the winding.

The cast had been set and notwithstanding all the plus points in its arsenal regarding the management of the country towards credible objectives, the machine was honed for an electoral victory by default. At this point the new wave of voters became a conspicuous irritant that needed to be quickly dispensed with. The party of dialogue, could only clone a part of its prepared campaign and apply it to the unfortunate new-style voters. The electoral reforms came in handy and the only answer that PN could give the voters for a real change was based on the unfairness of it all: The odds are stacked heavily against any kind of vote for change. You are lumped with having to choose between us and the devil. Do so and you are stupid, irresponsible, and in the words of a populist columnist ‘you will set yourselves up as objects of hate’.

Was this the only solution? For a party that invented the “No Regrets” issue this was one hell of a No Regret. No Regret of its participation in the electoral tweaking. It would not consider a coalition should the people elect a third party notwithstanding the odds. For heaven’s sake the PN came up with the absurd accusation that an opposition party had the balls to criticise it over the past five years. What was it expected to do? Did we at any given moment in the campaign hear any promise from the PN that this anomaly in the representative system of our country will be addressed once it is in power? Not that I know of. That’s the game and you are lumped with it.

As for AD, its biggest error was choosing to play by the twisted rules of the game. Instead of concentrating on the main issue and focusing exposing the system to its worst extreme, they chose the Coalition Gambit. They knew the odds were stacked against it but still chose to invest precious time and energy on just that. This choice may yet prove to be costly. They have had to justify a highly optimist prediction and they have had to sell that to a voter who has proven time and again not to be confident in letting go of old habits. Even before you begin to analyse the Sant effect on the whole issue I am sure you can appreciate the uphill battle in which AD chose to invest their electoral points.

In essence AD’s Coalition Campaign built a minefield around the very party that proposed it. Imagine it worked. Imagine a PN AD coalition. What then? My bet is that PN would leave no stone unturned to make AD look like the uncomfortable partner in the coalition and the ultimate scapegoats of any failure. Then AD would have to bear the responsibility of having not only shattered their own dream but of having dissuaded yet another voting generation from such a different way of practising politics. I guess you get my drift by now. The Coalition is not an answer to the problems we have. You choose to play the game and you get your hands dirty.

What future for the Third Way?

I am no augur. This election result will tell us who will run the country for the next mandate. The result I wanted to read is already there for the reading. There is a growing movement for a different kind of politics that has been unfairly treated in this election. No matter what the actual result in Parliament is this time round there is still much work to be done. Truly Sarkozy had hit on a good phrase when he said “Ensemble, tout est possible.”

Jacques René Zammit blogs daily on http://jaccuse.wordpress.com. Comments on the blog are welcome.