The great white hope

There is something vaguely dreamlike about Opposition leader Joseph Muscat's overall rhetoric at this week's Labour Party congress at Ta' Qali.

The same quality is discernable also in his party's overall approach to electioneering in recent months - and it both looks and feels unlike any of the same party's previous campaigns.

Consider, for instance, Muscat's tell-tale remark that "we're not interested in the past which divides us, but the future which unites us" - or even more cogently, his reference to the struggle between 'hope' and 'fear', and his self-identification with the former.

Clearly, the Labour leader is trying to make a final, definitive break with the past... at a time when the party in government, and above all the 'independent' commentators that prop it up, is hell-bent on associating him precisely with the excesses of the Mintoff administration.

Even the imagery accompanying the Labour Party billboard campaign seems to suggest a whole new approach. While the general idea is similar to the eyebrow-raising 'ballerina' image from the 2008 billboards, there is something infinitely slicker and more sophisticated in the picture of a child looking upwards towards that same 'unifying future' alluded to by Muscat.

Looking at the two campaigns today, one almost gets the impression of a complete reversal of roles. Labour, previously an accident-prone party that somehow always managed to project the image of being out of synch with the younger generation, now looks and sounds by far the more avant-garde of the two.

In Muscat's case, one doesn't need to look very far for the source of his inspiration. The visual imagery clearly owes a great deal to Tony Blair's 1997 campaign in the UK; while the slogans themselves were clearly based on Barack Obama's massively successful interplay between 'hope', 'trust' and 'change' in 2008.

But all this is the impression one gets basing oneself only on external factors such as style and image. It tells us very little about the content of the two parties' respective plans for the future.

Besides: while Labour's makeover (for want of a better word) has both enervated and invigorated the party as a whole, it must be pointed out that there is a danger in relying too much on glossy packaging and too little on content.

One can perfectly understand why Joseph Muscat would choose Obama as a role model; but he would be well advised to borrow more than just the occasional turn of phrase from a foreign statesman whose career did not always live up to the promise of his electioncampaign. Blair is another example, though the reasons for his particular turnaround in fortunes (mainly, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) stand little chance of repeating themselves in a local context.

Indeed, the choice of Obama as a role model is a risk in itself, seeing as the US president faces a tough re-election race in November, after a first term in office that left many of his own voters disillusioned.

Without entering the merits of whether or not this disillusionment is justified, one can easily appreciate the danger of artificially raising expectations to unsustainable levels in order to win an election... after which, one is invariably forced to scale back the same expectations one had earlier raised.

Even more devastating is failure to actually deliver on a specific promise. Here, an arguably better example would be that of Nick Clegg - the UK Lib Dem leader, currently in a coalition government with the Conservatives - who was recently forced to publicly apologise for failing to lower tuition fees in the UK, as he had promised to do before the election.

There is a lesson to be learnt in all this: and while Muscat has to date been careful not to make specific promises (which in turn means that he cannot afterwards be accused of having broken them) the fact remains that, having raised popular expectations of a brighter future under Labour, the ball is now very much in his own court to explain exactly how he intends to achieve this.

And to be fair, we have been given at least some indication. He has assured us that he will not raise minimum wage - a move criticised by the Greens, but which (rightly or wrongly) does have a certain stamp of economic responsibility about it. Muscat has also deflected scare tactics that he would remove stipends, overtime, scholarships, etc.

But is this enough, on its own, to convince the electorate that Muscat can actually deliver on the promise of hope? Clearly it is not. To be fully convinced, one would require detailed breakdown of actual, target-driven and costed proposals - something which Labour has not so far produced.

Up to a point, one can almost comprehend Muscat's reticence: looking only at the latest developments in PBS, which is obviously gearing up for a propaganda blitz before the next election, one can appreciate how anything Labour proposes will be routinely dismembered by a pack of well-placed media hounds.

But that in itself is far from good enough an excuse to keep the electorate in the dark. If the Labour leader wishes to dispel the last remaining doubts about his party's identity and its intentions, he will have to produce a good deal more than the occasional poetic image and glossy billboard.