The unravelling of Muscat’s coalition

Last week Moviment Graffitti organised a public protest in the form of a press conference in Castille Square where it presented an open letter signed by around 400 individuals coming from “diverse backgrounds and social realities”, and who all embrace and identify with Socialist, leftist or ‘progressive’ values.

The open letter, addressed to Cabinet, is a reaction to the recent court ruling rescinding the fraudulent privatisation of three state hospitals.

Joining Graffiti were well-known left-wing personalities, Sammy Meilaq and Yana Mintoff.

I was not surprised. I have realised quite some time ago that Graffitti’s populism was a cover up for their left-wing activism and that the leaders of the NGO were actually quite some distance away on the left of the political centre. For them the Vital-Stewards scandal is a handy reason to justify why privatisation should not be allowed to happen. But actually they are against privatisation on ideological grounds.

As they put it: “The privatisation of public assets should never be pursued by any government with the people’s long-term aspirations at heart. It is a procedure that benefits only the rich, to the detriment of everyone else.”

This is not correct. Many enterprises that were successfully privatised – like Mid-Med Bank (now HSBC) and Telemalta (now GO) – today pay the State much more income tax annually than the profits the ventures made when they were the property of the state. But this is too much for these left-wingers to stomach.

And they continued: “That this unsound pathway to national development was adopted by the Labour Party is a stain on its history, and a betrayal of the core beliefs that so many sympathise with.”

Incidentally the so-called ‘privatisation’ of the management of three hospitals completely failed because the deal was fraudulent from its very beginning – ‘ab ovo’ as the Romans used to say. And not because all privatisation deals are rotten, as these left-wingers imply. In fact, the deal was not even considered a public private partnership (PPP) because, as was said, the private partner was taking no risks.

The deal in fact was ‘sui generis’ and hardly fashioned according to established models of privatisation or PPPs.

One must not forget that some four months ago, a very moderate left-wing Labour Party exponent, Desmond Zammit Marmara, announced that he had decided to renew his Labour Party membership, saying: “I still consider myself a staunch Labourite but by this I now understand simply yearning for the day when once again I shall be able to form part of a Labour Party that is really Labour in its decisions and actions, and not a sham, being Labour in name only.” Earlier he had lamented that the Labour Party was being ruined by “brainless idiots”.

The latest MaltaToday poll confirmed that support for Robert Abela’s Labour Party is steadily dwindling. It is being abandoned by people from the two extremes of the political spectrum that Muscat had galvanised into one glorious and victorious movement – before the rot started soon after Muscat’s 2013 electoral victory. That movement is no more.

Abela is now caught between a rock and a hard place. If he espouses policies that are favoured by the likes of Sammy Meilaq and Graffitti, he will lose support from the middle ground... while if he does the opposite he will have to face the condemnation – and the abandonment – of the real leftists in his party.

Meanwhile, one would expect the Opposition to make substantial advances in popularity. This is not happening with people abandoning Labour preferring not to vote rather than vote PN.

Instead of building a new coalition – as Eddie Fenech Adami and Joseph Muscat had done before they won the trust of the majority – the current PN has tended to lock itself and withdraw into its shell, much like turtles do when they smell danger.

The PN needs to open up to everyone rather than criticising anyone who is not a ‘virgin pure’ Nationalist – whatever that is.

Otherwise the Labour Party inherited by Abela will keep on dragging its feet in power and Malta loses the chance to renew itself sooner rather than later.

An opportunity for China

Writing in The Washington Post, columnist David Ignatius argues that a strong China is bolstering a weak Russia. That is how he reads the recent meetings in Moscow between the leaders of the two countries.

The Chinese are not yet providing weapons to Russia but Xi certainly offered moral and psychological support in what, according to Ignatius, might be described as a “get-well visit to an ailing relative.”

The paradox of the Ukraine war is that Putin’s bid for greater power in Europe has made him weaker. This diminished Russia will fall increasingly under China’s influence, unless there’s an unlikely shift with a Western-leaning leader replacing Putin.

Bloomberg’s Iain Marlow thinks that Xi’s meetings in Moscow with Vladimir Putin put the Biden administration in an uncomfortable position: on the sidelines as two adversaries discuss a Ukraine peace proposal that the US has deemed unacceptable.

Sceptical US officials consider the Chinese ceasefire proposal to be a ceasefire that would reward Moscow’s invasion by securing its territorial gains.

If the US spurns the agreement, “China will likely ramp up messaging that the US is opposed to a cease-fire, that the US is opposed to the end of the war,” according to Bonny Lin, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who once served at the Pentagon.

The Biden administration has unsuccessfully tried to keep China on the sidelines since the start of the Ukraine invasion, and the opposite appears to have happened. Even as Xi and Putin grow closer, China is finding a receptive audience for its broader diplomatic push around the globe.

China has shrugged off US sanctions over the many partnerships that Chinese companies have with Russia, bought oil from Iran’s regime in defiance of western demands and helped orchestrate a diplomatic detente between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Major global economies such as India and Brazil are refusing to choose between China and the West, arguing they don’t want a new Cold War.

It seems that China’s clever diplomatic tactics are paying off.