This is 2015, not 1981…

Perhaps I am suffering from premature senile dementia… but is there some kind of election campaign going on that I haven’t been told about yet? 

Reason I ask is that Malta’s political scene today seems to be every bit as animated as it was at the height of the last election campaign in 2013… and the one before that, and before that again, etc. 

Consider the following news headlines, all of which were uploaded onto online news portals over the past couple of days:

1) “‘Gaffarena deal proof that corruption is now institutionalised’ – PN” (MaltaToday, 15 June, 7.44am)

2) “Simon Busuttil to go to China to ‘see what Mizzi’s wife is doing’” (MaltaToday, 15 June, 7.10pm)

3) “Emissions increase shows failure of government’s traffic plan” – PN (The Times, 16 June, 9.50am)

4) “PN wonders why Michael Falzon has not resigned yet” (The Times, 16 June, 12.12pm)

5) “PN insists Falzon had 'early knowledge of Old Mint scandal'” (MaltaToday, 16 June, 1.04pm)

OK, I’ll stop there... even though I could very easily go on like this for years. There is, in fact, a never-ending backlog of almost identical stories… but I think the above selection should suffice for now.

If you look closely at the chronology of these stories, you will see that they all appeared just a few hours apart. Now that would be considered an extraordinary spurt of political activity under any circumstances… but at a time when the next general election is still three full years away? What are they even thinking? 

Well, it looks to me like the PN’s strategy team might be thinking that the entire party would simply disappear in a puff of pale blue smoke, if it wasn’t given some form of press attention every five minutes of every single day. 

But anyone in his right mind (especially those who actually want the PN to ever claw its way back into power again) would probably be thinking something else. 

They’d be thinking of changing that particular strategy team, and replacing it with one that might actually make the party more attractive to the moderate voter, instead of less. 

Otherwise, we will all be condemned to an incessant barrage of increasingly mindless political hysteria every day for the next three years… before the PN actually increases the pace of its output, in the last nine weeks of campaigning before the actual election.

Can they physically do this? Perhaps. They are, after all, being assisted by a government that keeps supplying them with endless ammunition to use against itself… mostly in the form of cock-ups of the ‘Gaffarena’ variety, etc. 

But the question that PN supporters might want to ask themselves is another. Does it actually serve the PN’s own interest to sustain this improbable tempo of activity for the next three years? 

For what it’s worth, my answer would be: no, definitely not. And here is why.

Look back at the newspaper coverage of the 2013 election campaign today (all relevant articles are still accessible online), and you will note that the PN’s statements and activities were likewise all timed to appear in the press every few hours or so. 

This means that there is no difference between the campaigning mode of the Nationalist Party today – i.e., at a time when there is no actual ‘campaigning’ to be done – and at the height of a heated campaign for an election which the PN went on to lose by an unprecedented margin anyway.

Is it possible, therefore, that nobody within the PN can see how utterly unsustainable this sort of approach to politics is in the 21st century? With all the experience these people have accrued over decades of electioneering… don’t they realise that at the present (self-imposed) rate, the entire party will simply combust long before 2018, through a combination of exhaustion and over-exposure… not to mention through boring us all to tears with an astonishingly childish repetitive mantra that no one in his right mind would possibly take seriously anyway?

This brings me to the actual ‘substance’ (such that it is) of all the complaints now raised by the Opposition roughly every quarter of an hour or so. Let’s just stick to the above examples, and see where they take us:

1) “‘Gaffarena deal proof that corruption is now institutionalised’ – PN”

Ah yes: because of course, corruption was never ‘institutionalised’ under successive Nationalist governments, was it? Strangely, however, when this newspaper ran a series of articles about Enemalta’s oil procurement methods in 2007, the institutional response at the time was to pooh-pooh the stories, and to resort to ‘confidentiality clauses’ and ‘national security concerns’ to avoid answering all media (and even parliamentary) questions on the subject. 

With hindsight, we all know what the government was trying to hide at the time. It was trying to hide the fact that it had raised water and electricity bills by more than 100% in 2009, to make up for the shortfall caused by wholesale, institutionalised corruption in the procurement of oil by Enemalta. 

Yet the PN only complains about institutionalised corruption today, in connection with an issue (dubious expropriation deals) that was just as rife throughout its own 25-year stint in government.

Does this mean that people shouldn’t be worried about ‘institutionalised corruption’ under the Labour government? No, of course not. It just means we all know that we can’t rely on a future PN government to behave any differently, that’s all...

2) “Simon Busuttil to go to China to ‘see what Mizzi’s wife is doing’…”

Hmm. All I can say to this one is that… it’s such a pity Simon Busuttil never considered going to Gozo ‘to see what Giovanna Debono’s husband was doing’ instead. For one thing, it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than flying all the way to Shanghai. For another, it might have avoided imparting the inevitable impression that – as far as Busuttil is concerned - ‘scandals’ are only ever ‘scandals’ when they involve the Labour government. 

Nationalist ministers, you see, are allowed to employ their spouses within their own ministries. It’s only when Labour ministers do the same that all hell breaks loose. And on it goes: the same old hypocrisy, over and over again… in fact, the next example is merely an extension of the same double standards:

4) ‘PN wonders why Michael Falzon hasn’t resigned yet’.

Yes, well, I wonder about that too. Could it be, perchance, for the same reason that Giovanna Debono stolidly refused to resign until her husband was actually hauled to court on multiple charges of misappropriation of funds? Because it seems that when allegations of misconduct concern Nationalist ministers, such allegations first have to be thoroughly investigated before there is any talk of ‘resignation’… and even then, at minimum there would have to be actual criminal charges for anyone to actually resign.

Not so when Labour is in power, however. Oh, no. When allegations are levelled at Labour ministers, these have to instantly tender their resignations… long, long before investigations into the alleged misconduct have even been completed (let alone resulted in criminal charges in court, etc.)

And of course, the same applies to all the other cases, too. For instance: protestors at next Saturday’s demonstration against Zonqor point will have to rub shoulders with Opposition MPs who, only a few years ago, had voted to consign over two million square metres of ODZ land to speculative development. 

Exactly how these people can expect to be taken seriously – when they argue so passionately against a much more modest proposal to develop 150,000 square metres of ODZ land today - is quite frankly beyond me. And judging by the fact that the PN has already organised its own protest, which attracted just a few hundred people… it is evidently beyond all those people whose concerns with Zonqor point (unlike the PN’s) are actually genuine.

But back to the truly remarkable thing about the PN under its present leadership: i.e., the sheer pace of its frantic activity as an Opposition party. For whatever strategic reason, the PN has now chosen to enter full-throttle election campaign mode as from now… when the election is actually scheduled for 2018. 

The last time something like this happened was in 1981, when the same PN – then under Eddie Fenech Adami – had refused to accept the “perverse” electoral result, and campaigned for the 1987 election throughout its full term in opposition. 

Whatever one makes of Fenech Adami’s strategy at the time, I think we can all agree that the situation facing the country in 1981 was slightly more serious than anything we face today…. when, for all the present government’s many blemishes, we are actually experiencing unprecedented levels of economic growth, and record employment figures to boot.

Yet the Opposition is acting as though we were still in the grips of the same tragic political circumstances that ultimately led to the death of Raymond Caruana (among other execrable episodes) in 1986. 

Is this the sort of approach the Nationalist Party needs to win back the thousands of moderate voters who abandoned it in droves in 2013? Speaking entirely for myself… no, I don’t think so at all. 

In fact, I think it’s a rather daft and childish strategy, aimed only at firing up the dangerously volatile hard-core element within the PN’s support-base – i.e., the people who will always vote PN anyway – while losing sight of the one category of voter it actually needs, if it ever hopes to actually turn its current political fortunes around.

But then again, my opinion hardly counts... after all, I’m only one of those voters myself, so what would I know?