Someone has given up on politics

So Ivan Bartolo, CEO at IT firm 6PM, has declared on a Facebook post that he has lost faith in politics and politicians.

He came to this conclusion after reading the Politico follow-up on the IIP, which repeated the very well known fact that many Nationalist party officials, MEPs and lawyers were serving as intermediaries or agents for the investor citizenship scheme.

Now it has to be said that Politico repeated what had already been reported in Malta over a year ago, when the press started reporting on the numerous legal firms, which are also represented by people in politics from the PN side as well as from the PL side, that had registered to be agents for the passport scheme. Keep in mind that the PN had at the outset been a fervent critic of the IIP, requesting that a property and investment element be added to the requirements for acquiring citizenship.

And it’s for this reason that I find Bartolo’s Facebook post weird. Was he not, until recently, another fervent supporter of Simon Busuttil and his party reforms, addressing party rallies, even chairing the PN’s policy forum on the economy? “A business survey I read about rated honesty and integrity as the essential qualities of a business leader. And that’s what Simon Busuttil reminds me of: honesty and integrity. Busuttil is the reason I am getting closer to politics… Busuttil stood up to be counted [to run for PN leader] when he could have still been Malta’s most voted MEP [in Brussels],” Bartolo was quoted once as saying.

Well, it has to be said that the main shareholder of 6PM today is construction magnate Zaren Vassallo, a proud Nationalist donor and activist who falls squarely in the ‘friends of friends’ equation of politics.

Vassallo himself remains a busy participant in the Maltese economy. Only last week, Zaren – who until 2013 was the curse of Labour and one if its media’s favourite targets – was awarded a €25 million contract by this very same administration.

A request for proposals issued by the University of Malta in 2015 attracted only one bid – his bid – for “the concession, design, building and operation of a University Residence and Community Complex” on land bought by the University of Malta in 2013.  

The €25 million complex, to be built on 10,589 square metres, will comprise an eight-block student village, offering over 600 beds and a number of outlets and facilities situated around a central plaza. The complex will also house the University of Malta’s childcare centre and a language school and will include a four-level underground car park for 450 vehicles. 

Now, all these details would seem rather irrelevant to the point I am about to make.

The truth is that the business community – a community of hard-nosed money-makers who are solely interested in profit and long-time investment – have at this very point in time, absolutely no reason to complain. The Labour administration has opened the floodgates to development and business initiatives, not to mention that it is a lucky time for Prime Minister Joseph Muscat  (low oil prices, booming tourism figures, advantageous tax regime), for him to catalyse this boom.

The moral? There is none. Businessmen won’t give a hoot about anything that is not their profit and loss account. Which is why they would have to be raving mad to change anything about the climate they are operating in.

And this is where the State is abdicating its role as regulator. The political landscape has changed profoundly, with the majority of big business honchos emphatically embracing Labour much as they did when it was Eddie Fenech Adami calling the shots. And in such a climate, Simon Busuttil has a serious and acute problem. What does he do? Take the side of business (which every political party seems to ultimately need) or confront them?

Until now, it has been a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, a balancing game necessary to keep up political face with both business and voters. But the alternative to what Muscat has brewed up in this country? That answer is not simple, and it is perhaps for that reason that it is even harder for the PN to reinvent itself today.

Because reinventing itself will mean a fresh face, a new agenda, one that cannot only sound the same bugle of zero-sum politics. The PN is an opposition in a favourable economic climate, where deprivation or destitution cannot be milked, and it is a catch-all party competing with that other catch-all party, Labour. Change is going to be difficult and time is not plenty.

And then there is another reality: politics is all about communication and charisma, about feeling that you need to be led. Like Muscat did when he sat on the Opposition benches, the PN has to be able to propose and conjure up dreams that people aspire to. Little right now would seem to suggest it has the necessary sex appeal to flog these aspirations.

Even on Net TV the other day: I witnessed the promo for Iswed fuq l-Abjad for a visit of Nationalist nostalgics in Ragusa, Sicily, led by former MP and Studiomaster operator Richard Muscat. Muscat had back then in the 1980s upped sticks to launch the PN’s reply to TVM’s horrible manipulation of the news and propaganda from the likes of Eileen Montesin (who since then embraced Fenech Adami, and found herself broadcasting on Net TV). Someone inside the PN must be thinking that rekindling the Studiomaster memories will bring back some lost sheep.

But that only counts for people unlike me, who knew Richard Muscat, and who – let it be known – was not exactly commandeering a guerrilla army in the Ragusan jungle, which is home to good wine and pasta dishes.

I get the impression that the PN’s machinery has just got stuck in the distant past, when there was good reason to fight the Mintoff brood, which brandished the sledgehammer.

The truth is that the PN today needs to learn something from the Labour stable. It has to do away with its own past. The PL dumped its Brigata Laburista, sandpapered over its leftist façade, and fielded new young faces all looking like overdressed stockbrokers.  

The PN needs a charismatic leader, who appeals to all classes and is her or his own wo/man.

And it must decide whether it wants to align itself with a soulless business community, or with the people, the hoi polloi they usually look down on. The PN cannot just drift with the current, smiling to one businessman today, tomorrow extending its hand to the people. One question: where was Simon Busuttil during the Sliema Townsquare battle?

You could be justified for thinking where the people so badly needed to tilt the balance are: are they too busy investing in property, seeking returns from the bond issues for the new high-rise projects, seeing what car to flash around in, and whether they should buy a second home in Mellieha or Gozo?

Because I often ask myself whether some people really even deserve to be represented when their seemingly sole demand to political parties is that they better their own personal lives, with little interest for the wider community. Do voters really think that change, communal change, will make them personally better off?

Like those Nationalist lawyers who cannot escape the reality that their law firms want to line their pockets with the crumbs of the global rich from Beijing and Moscow coming to Malta, I think most Maltese just want to think of their own pockets and nothing else.

That’s why that comment from Ivan Bartolo, of all people, a man whose job is based on the bottom-line and P&L account, strikes me as weird. Giving up, now, on all politicians and politics? Unsurprising, but quite late in the day to wake up to this reality.