Orange you glad it’s not red or blue?

Out of curiosity: has someone changed the meaning of the word ‘imminent’ while I wasn’t looking? Reason I ask is that… well, some months ago I interviewed Marlene Farrugia (note: if you’ve never heard of her, it’s probably because she’s terribly publicity shy, and avoids the limelight at all costs), and she told me at the time that the launch of her new party was “imminent”. 

In fact, that was about the only thing she could tell me about this party of hers. Everything else – its identity, its main political objectives, its reason for actually existing, etc. – was at the time still “under discussion”.

All these weeks later, we still don’t know much about Marlene Farrugia’s “imminent ” new party – except that it was supposed to have been launched last Thursday, after months of preparation. Well, I’m writing this on a Friday, so I suppose one of two things must have happened. Either it was a seriously low profile party launch, which was not picked up by a single newspaper or media outlet on the island... or else the proposed launch deadline had to be postponed. Again… 

But hey, what’s the big deal? Missing deadlines is part and parcel of the political game in Malta, you know. In fact it has more or less become a local tradition. Labour, for instance, promised us a new power station within a year of its election… and that was in 2013. According to my almanac, it is now 2016; and not only is this new power station nowhere near completion, but the minister who made the promise has meanwhile been stripped of the energy portfolio. 

Not, mind you, that it stopped him from flying all the way to China to find out what’s taking the suppliers so long. But then again, if a power station can miss a deadline by three whole years, without anyone batting an eyelid… I suppose it follows that someone can continue playing the part of ‘energy minister’, even several weeks after technically losing that job.

Both circumstances – the curious incident of the missed launch deadline, and the energy minister who is somehow also not an energy minister – illustrate a curious inversion of the space-time continuum that seems to affect all aspects of politics in Malta. It is as though ‘Time’ means something else altogether when applied to a political party. Indeed, it even means different things when applied to different political parties.

Another example comes courtesy of the Nationalists: you know, the political party that imploded over corruption and governance issues just three years ago… but which has now made it is mission to eradicate the ‘filth’ and ‘mud’ of Muscat’s ‘mafia’ from our shores. 

The same PN has also spent the better part of the last 20 years assuring us that it will (one day) publish its accounts; but needless to add, like all political deadlines this one has been moved about like a pawn on a chess board… i.e., always pushed slightly forward, and always in the hope that the other player fails to notice. 

Naturally, it doesn’t matter that the PN has proved spectacularly incapable of coming clean on the precise extent of its own debt (or on the small question of whom all this money – conservatively estimated at 8 million – is actually owed to, and in return for what). Their own failure to adhere to the most basic tenets of ‘transparency’ and ‘accountability’ has never stopped the anti-corruption crusaders from insisting on ‘transparency’ and ‘accountability’ from everyone else.

We are talking about two different time zones here, you see: the blue time zone, in which ‘time’ can always be stretched, bent or inverted to suit the Nationalists’ political platform; and the red time zone, where failure to respect deadlines is tantamount to an instant ‘scandal’. And to get the view from the other side, all you have to do is switch round the colours. In the ‘red time zone’, the laws of physics apply with their usual precision to the blues… but not, of course, to the reds. And so on ad infinitum.

Ah, but all this was supposed to “imminently” become history, wasn’t it? The interesting thing right now is that a new political movement is in the offing (and has been for months); one we are told will abandon the traditional, manifestly substandard way of doing politics, in favour of a more focused, target-oriented approach. 

To quote its imminent founder-to-be: “There is […] the desire for a different of way of putting politics into place… not just in the imagination, or in a manifesto, but in reality. People believe that things really can be done differently. That is why the scientific input is so important to us…”

In other words, one would assume that Marlene Farrugia’s new party is itself a response to a demand from the electorate: and that this demand is specifically for an approach to politics that is NOT rooted in the above, patently childish ‘colour-coding’.

All things told, then… not the most confidence-inspiring of starts, is it? A new party that is supposed to already be one day old has not (apparently) been launched at all… so beyond Marlene Farrugia’s vague assurances of a ‘centre-left’ party, we are none the wiser regarding where this ‘new party’ will actually stand on any given national issue.

But again, this only means that its political priorities are exactly in synch with those of the other two parties. Who cares about national issues, anyway? Who cares what a new party thinks of the minimum wage, immigration, the economy, public health, education, civil liberties, justice, and all that? The important thing is that they’ve already chosen a colour. Yep: that’s right… some of us may have hoped this new party would finally take Malta beyond the dynamic of a political colouring-book for children. Yet it has started out by identifying itself with a colour of its own… long before getting to trickier part of defining (and explaining) a political vision for the entire country.

Makes perfect sense, too… from the perspective the same party was trying to demolish. We already know from our experience with the other two parties that colour is the only thing that matters in local politics. Indeed, it has for some time now been the only thing that distinguishes one party from the other. 

As Dr Seuss might have put it had he been Maltese: ‘One party, two party, red party blue party.” Tells you everything you need to know about the pair of them, really. As does that memorable Graffitti placard at that anti-corruption protest recently: “Same shit, different colour [I mean, government]”.

Oh, and before I forget: the new party’s colour is ‘orange’. Which is a great choice, I hasten to add. We already had ‘red’, ‘green’ and ‘blue’… ‘yellow’, too, if you count the Church as a political influence in the country. Now that ‘orange’ has been added to the mix, we almost have enough colours for a game of Trivial Pursuit. (The missing colour, of course is ‘brown’. And what was that graffiti slogan again…?)

But of course, the choice of colour is significant in other ways. It always is. I myself find it interesting that the new party would choose a colour that can be associated both the European liberals (not to mention the Dutch national football team…  which is more or less the same thing) and the early Christian democrats. Try positioning a modern political party at midway point between those two positions, and see what happens. You’ll end up with a party that is both liberal and conservative on the same issues at the same time; that would vote in two contradictory ways on virtually every resolution in the European parliament; and that would appeal for votes to people on opposites of any given issue… knowing full well that it would have to honour some promises, and renege on others.

In other words, you’ll end up with a carbon copy of the other two parties. It would be an identical twin to Muscat’s Labour… which proposed a reform of a blasphemy laws, only to have its own party whip (Marlene’s husband, as it happens) weeping profusely in parliament about the decline in Catholic Malta’s moral fibre. It would be the doppelganger of Busuttil’s PN, which thunders from the rooftops about the Panama scandal, while simultaneously defending Malta’s role as a minor player in international tax evasion game.

Of the two resemblances, the second makes the most sense… at least, if you look at it from the same old, warped traditional perspective we were hoping to change. Our latest survey seems to confirm earlier suspicions that Marlene’s party is acting as a magnet for disaffected Nationalists, far more than for their Labour counterparts… even though she herself seems to envisage it as a challenge to Labour on social issues.

Who knows? Perhaps this very dilemma is the cause of the new party’s failure to actually launch on time. The demographic it is appealing to the most (whether by accident or design) is not exactly what you would call ‘homogenous’. People who are ‘disillusioned with the PN’? That’s a huge and largely conflicting category. Examples range from those who feel it has abandoned its Christian Democratic roots (i.e., that is not conservative enough); to people who no longer feel represented by the PN on civil liberties (i.e., that it is not liberal enough); to those who cannot trust it on governance matters (i.e., that it is not credible enough). 

A new party can certainly home in on any one of those issues – with the third being the most politically profitable, in a country fed up to the back teeth with political hypocrisy – but all three at the same time? Not possible… not, at least, without going down to the same path that led the PN to where it is today, and the PL to where it will no doubt be tomorrow. 

The first step along that path concerns mistaking a ‘colour’ with a ‘political belief’. And it looks like it’s already been taken…