Let’s do the time warp again

I’ve always said Maltese politics would make a good basis for a Broadway-style musical. It’s not just the abundance of melodrama, the histrionics, the outrageous posturing, and the fact that a ‘song and dance’ has to be choreographed about absolutely everything… it’s also because Broadway musicals (like Maltese politics) have their own unique spatial and temporal dynamics… which do not necessarily have any place in the real world.

It is partly why I have never been a fan of the musical genre. Take ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ as an example: it’s probably the only musical I’ve ever watched more than once. Is it amusing? Oh, certainly. Is it entertaining? Absolutely (unless, like me, you’re allergic to Meatloaf).

But is it the sort of thing any level-headed person could take seriously for more than five minutes? Erm… not quite. Leaving aside the outlandish costumes, the zany plot, the bizarre characters, the heavy dose of mock Gothic horror, and all that… the simple fact is that ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show’ (or, for that matter, ‘The Sound of Music’, ‘Chicago’, ‘West Side Story’, etc.) dispenses with the rhythms and rules of everyday reality. As a rule, people in the real world do not burst into elaborately staged dance routines every time they want to make a point. If they did, we’d be too busy asking them what medication they were on – and whether we could have any of it ourselves – to pay any attention to what they were actually saying.

Strangely, however, we all accept this sort of thing in musicals. And in Disney movies, too. For some reason, it doesn’t feel unusual to have to wait for a rousing chorus to subside, just so that a conversation can carry on precisely where it left off before. All the things we associate with the musical genre might make perfect sense within the confines of that genre… but they would be considered outrageous or bizarre in any other context.

Well, it’s exactly the same with local politics. If anyone out here in the real world tried behaving the same way as prime ministers and opposition leaders, they’d probably find themselves carted off kicking and screaming in a straitjacket (or worse) within minutes. And yet – curiously – when politicians resort to behaviour that would be unacceptable in anyone else, we all accept it as perfectly normal. It’s just like watching a musical: you have to make a mental adjustment to subconsciously park your credulity at the door for the duration of the show.

This week’s cabinet reshuffle is as good an example as any. In ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’, the analogous moment would be when Riff Raff turns around and launches into the Time Warp (the most famous – and annoying – song in the entire movie). After a slow and patient build-up of suspense, we finally get to see a little of the promised madness and mayhem. And what happens? Well, it goes like this:

You take a jump to the right… and then a kick up the stairs… you move your pieces around… just like musical chairs… But when the chips are down, everything stays the sa-a-ame…

[All together now] Let’s do the Time Warp again!

Because that is, ultimately, the beauty of this latest pirouette by Joseph Muscat. You can do it again and again… there is simply no limit to the number of times you can reshuffle your Cabinet, if you keep including all the burnt-out cards in the deck.

So in the end, we got a cabinet reshuffle in which the only person to be actually waltzed out of the Cabinet was Leo Brincat – who got ‘promoted’ to the European Court of Auditors instead – while the only person to be brought in from the outside was Manuel Mallia: i.e., the one who had been booted out two years ago.

Meanwhile, the minister who has faced repeated resignation calls for the past nine weeks (not just by the Opposition, but also from within his own party… not to mention from a nationwide majority, according to our most recent polls) was retained in the Cabinet, and practically given a promotion to boot.

Yep, that’s a musical moment to be proud of. Flies in the face of all the ordinary, everyday rules of engagement… but somehow makes perfect sense within the parameters of its own, utterly absurd universe.

To fully appreciate the absurdity, all you have to do is picture the same thing happening in practically any other context. A private company takes a board decision to suspend an executive, pending investigations into alleged improper behaviour. Two years later, another executive faces similar allegations… so what does the board do? It creates a vacancy by giving yet another employee (this time, one with no question mark around his own behaviour) the equivalent of a golden handshake… then uses the vacancy to bring the earlier disgraced official back on board.

After that, it reassigns the latest scandal-hit executive to a newly created post, which allows him to simply carry on as before… only with even less in the way of transparency and accountability.

How would the company shareholders react, I wonder? Wouldn’t they argue that the board’s decision did nothing to address the actual allegations… while making it even easier for the same allegations to keep resurfacing, time and time again? And wouldn’t they also be justified in suspecting some kind of unsavoury hold over the board of directors, by the two officials who so clearly benefitted from the proceedings?

At the same time, however, you also have to marvel at the sheer sense this decision makes, once you make that switch over from the logic of everyday reality, to the logic of musical politics. Anyone outside that universe might conceivably be concerned with how a situation like Panamagate (or the equivalent in a non-political context) would pan out in the end. Not Joseph Muscat, though. He has absolutely nothing to worry about…

Indeed, perhaps the only unusual thing about this Cabinet reshuffle is the fact that he took any decision at all. He didn’t have to… actually, he had several good reasons to just keep soldiering on regardless.

For starters, the same polls I alluded to above also revealed something else; something that would certainly not have been lost on Joseph Muscat. Incongruous as this may seem in any other context, his own approval ratings have improved over the past nine weeks… so much so that he has somehow managed to widen the gap between himself and Simon Busuttil.

Again, this seems to fly in the face of common sense: even if you allow the possibility (almost a certainty) that the political tension fanned by Busuttil has caused the two parties to further entrench in their positions… causing the party faithful to close ranks, renew their oaths of allegiance, etc etc… the past nine weeks have still exposed Muscat as an indecisive and weak leader.

Had he been a CEO instead of a PM, such dilly-dallying would almost certainly carry a high price tag. In the political trenches, however, it clearly stands you in good stead. With so many calls for ‘action’ coming from your political opponents, ‘doing nothing’ suddenly becomes a heroic act of defiance.

Another thing working in the prime minister’s favour was the recent confidence motion moved against his government by the Opposition, which he won comfortably: allowing him to simply deflect all questions about his government’s ‘legitimacy’, by pointing towards what is ultimately a Parliamentary renewal of his mandate.

Both these considerations simply reinforce the earlier question. Why do anything at all? Joseph Muscat could have just kept dragging the ordeal out for months… and there is every reason to suppose that his popularity would have continued to grow, as it grew in recent weeks.

A couple of possibilities immediately spring to mind. One, I strongly suspect that Muscat would indeed have carried on doing nothing at all… had an unplanned opportunity not suddenly arisen when least expected.

Ultimately, this Cabinet reshuffle was not precipitated by Panamagate at all. The driving force behind this decision was not, as one might have expected, the need to remove Mizzi from office following a public outcry; it was the need to replace Leo Brincat as environment minister, after the latter was called upon to replace Toni Abela as Malta’s nominee for the European Court of Auditors.

It was Toni Abela’s rejection for that post by MEPs, then, which provided Muscat the opportunity needed to move a few pieces around the chessboard. By choosing Brincat as replacement, Muscat created the necessary space to both reinstate Mallia and reinvent Mizzi’s role into something even more secretive and unaccountable. And as with the confidence vote and the climate of political warfare – both of which have evidently strengthened Muscat’s position – the catalyst that sparked this entire non-reshuffle was also in part the Opposition’s doing.

Never mind, then, that Muscat’s ‘decisive’ Cabinet reshuffle just leaves us exactly where we were before he took it; politically, he has responded to the public outrage. As far as he is concerned, the chapter is now closed.

And if the Opposition, the media, civil society and all the rest of us are not satisfied by the outcome… well, perhaps they should all consider their own responsibility in creating the circumstances that allowed Muscat to get away with it… by turning this into an ‘us against them’ scenario (when ‘they’ are politically much stronger than ‘us’).

In the meantime: sit back, relax, and enjoy the show… it’s only going to get more bizarre from now on.