[ANALYSIS] Robert Abela’s Team Malta: Which side are you on?

Robert Abela might not be as good an orator as his predecessor, but he certainly has understood Maltese society and its deeply-rooted sentiments of national pride and aspiration for unity.

Last Sunday he invited the Opposition to join ‘Team Malta’ by defending the revamped programme to sell passports to the global elite – this time with more stringent residency obligations – now the subject of an infringement procedure by the European Commission.

Forget the irony in calling for national unity when defending the very scheme that defies the tradition notion of national identity (indeed, it is simply an instrumental view of the foreigner as a source of income).

Despite the reputational damage caused by the crudeness of the IIP, the programme has proved its worth during the pandemic, helping the country mitigate the economic downturn with a fat kitty that financed the increased expenditure on healthcare and benefits.

So who really forms part of Team Malta?

In itself the IIP raises questions on who forms part of team Malta. By creating two classes of migrants – one, the global rich who pay to fast-track their way to a Maltese passport, the other migrant workers who pay taxes and national insurance, are active members of the community yet are treated like disposable guests – the scheme raises questions about the composition of “team Malta.”

For Malta is now a country in which one-fourth of social security contributions are paid by foreigners, the majority of which can only be naturalised after more than a decade.

Abela’s appeal also suggests that critics of the IIP are ‘against Malta’, a notion that sows more division than unity. And it’s an approach that puts the opposition in a quandary. That’s because local elites cringe at Malta offering fast-track citizenship to rich Arabs and Eastern Europeans, but then this sentiment is weaker than the utilitarian nationalism of a government defending a source of national income. And the Opposition is unable or unwilling to criticise the class distinctions created by the scheme in a context where most foreigners living here have no right to vote and are therefore excluded from ‘Team Malta’.

Once again, Abela also makes the same appeal for unity on “immigration”, even though it is not exactly clear what such agreement with him entails. For while there is a vast national consensus that the EU has not been fair with Malta by refusing to share the burden of asylum seekers rescued at sea, the national consensus Abela propose hints at supporting a bellicose foreign policy to skirt around Malta’s humanitarian obligations.

So by pushing the opposition to support him on an issue Abela proposes as popular ‘common sense’, the Prime Minister emboldens bigots who simply want our ports to remain closed in the face of human tragedy.

And with an election looming, the risk is that Abela may be more tempted to use strong-arm tactics as summer approaches.

Still, Abela himself has so far never presented a clear blueprint on which the national consensus on immigration can be based. In the past months he just kept repeating his inane “Malta is full-up” mantra, an admission which simply exacerbates popular antagonism towards immigrants but offers little in terms of concrete actions.

In short Abela is simply using immigration as political football, helped in the process by a misguided court case by Repubblika aimed at him and the army’s top brass, which only solidified Abela’s hold on his supporters, despite the reservations of a segment of progressive Labour voters who shun xenophobia.

Are foreign workers part of the team?

To remain in sync with popular concerns on immigration, on Sunday PN leader Bernard Grech latched on to comments by finance minister Clyde Caruana that the country needs to start addressing the downward pressure on wages by foreign workers, insisting this was a vindication of the Opposition’s stance.

Interestingly, both Caruana and Grech link the downward pressure on local wages to “foreign workers” and not to the exploitation of these workers. In this case Caruana has pre-empted the Opposition coming up with concrete ideas and measures – like introducing quotas for particular sectors where foreign workers are needed and obliging employers benefiting from the importation of labour to employ a minimum number of Maltese workers. In so doing Caruana has exposed the failure of the Opposition to come up with realistic and concrete proposals.

Minimum wage: on whose side is Team Malta?

Still, by sticking to the ‘Delia script’ on the risks posed by foreign workers, Bernard Grech’s party not only ignores the utilitarianism of Maltese nationalism – which sees foreigners as just a cash injection – but it is distracted from coming up with proposals on boosting wages, something which benefits both Maltese and foreign workers.

Grech has yet to beef up his earlier declaration about supporting a living wage, which was mentioned in a pre-Budget document presented by the party. Moreover the Opposition has been silent on a proposed EU directive which defines an adequate minimum wage as being at least 50% of the country’s average wage and 60% of the country’s median wage.

While the government wants this directive to become only a recommendation, the parliamentary opposition has not objected to this approach. In this case the role of opposition was taken up by Moviment Graffitti, which is increasingly filling the wide gap on the left in the spectrum.

Understandably both parties are keen not to alienate small and medium-sized businesses, which are passing through testing times because of COVID. But they tend to overlook the fact that wage stagnation has coincided with a period of economic growth which generated massive profits in a number of sectors. Finding ways of helping small businesses pay a living wage by taxing the windfall profits of other sectors could well be part of the solution.

Moreover this also raises the question on which side Team Malta is playing in this game: is it on the side of the bosses or on the side of the workers? In this case, the government’s defence of the national turf puts Team Malta on the side of conservative politics, undermining the interests of both Maltese and foreign workers.

Soft power for good causes?

One thing remains lacking from the ‘Team Malta’ theme: a positive use of Malta’s international soft power for progressive and humanitarian global causes.

With the country’s reputation in the pits following the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia, an investment in positive soft power may go a long way in making amends. Malta just risks being perceived as a small rich country which is open to the global rich but closed to the wretched of the earth, apart from its constant defence against demands for tax justice.

Under Abela, Malta’s most significant contribution so far have been towards the peace process in Libya, something the government could flaunt more. Rather than focusing on just defending its turf from pesky foreigners, Malta may well invest more in its international image, by reclaiming its role in the 1970s as a voice for social justice and peace in the Middle East and the Mediterranean region.