Alarmingly, Muscat and his many cronies could win yet again.  If they do, it won’t be due to any great leadership, vision, capacity, or brilliance on their part.  It will be a victory for cynicism, graft, cunning and corruption. 

It will be a victory for the weakness and vanity of Abela and his cabinet of poseurs, the fundamental arrogance of this version of the Labour Party, the multiple inabilities of the Nationalist Party and the abysmal state of our hollowed-out institutions, especially the police and the court system.

It will be a victory for the most obvious of lies over any substantive truth.  It will be a victory for that very dark Malta that has blighted public life for decades and more.  But most of all, it will be a victory for tribal populism, for the most superficial of ‘political’ inanities and for Malta’s very own edition of Trumpism. 

As with Trump, the name of the game at every turn and in every circumstance is lie and deny, deflect, and sow chaos.  It will be a victory for the criminal culture best exemplified by Muscat and by those who share his ugly and twisted vision of Malta and what it means to be Maltese. 

It will be a victory for everything that Malta should not and need not be.  It will be yet another stain on Malta’s already heavily stained copybook.  It is both deeply embarrassing and damaging for all upright and honest (but too silent) Maltese.

Attempting to undo the deep-seated rot of Muscat and his fellow travellers (the list is an expanding rogue’s gallery) and the havoc they seek to sow has and will continue to cost dearly at every level.  That cost embraces the economic, the political, the administrative, the environmental, the ideological, and the emotional.

But perhaps the most significant cost is psychological and existential as measured in the damage to public life, public culture, and public confidence.   Behind the bravado, the threats, and the bullying, lies a deep unease and the knowledge that all is by no means well. 

Malta as a society, a political entity and as a ‘brand’ has been seriously undermined.  Maltese private and public life is emotionally drained as it attempts to come to terms with Muscat, his cabal of henchmen and women and all they represent.

Malta is deeply divided.  The country’s traditional political tribalism continues to be strategically manipulated with many willingly buying into it.  Malta’s innate sense of itself and the values it claims to assert have been deeply usurped. 

The suggestion that Labour would win upcoming European elections with a 40,000 vote surplus if Muscat inserted himself into the process is truly chilling.  The suggestion that 8 out of 10 Labour voters would vote for him is deeply depressing and indicative of just how low standards have been driven.

Such data implies that he, Malta’s very own Trump is a ‘winner’ regardless of behaviour, illegalities, or consequences. 

Malta is now dominated by a grasping, aggressive and cruel political and social system as starkly evidenced in the cases of Daphne Caruana Galicia, Miriam Pace, Jean Paul Sofia, and Lassana Cisse.  The recent posturing of our Prime Minister in the wake of the inquiry report on the death of Jean Paul Sofia is indicative. 

As in so many other places and times, when people live in such a deformed system, its dominant values become ‘normalised’.  Those values and traits are, piece by piece, absorbed into the texture and fabric of society.  In turn, this feeds the beast and facilitates an even crueller, more grasping, and more aggressive system.

These dominant values become so embedded that we tend to forget they are there.

Precious and urgently needed creativity, time, energy, and resources are wasted on the agenda of these people precisely at the time when far more important issues urgently need our uninterrupted attention and capacity.

We are currently afflicted by a national pandemic of mini Muscats and a dangerous and wasting condition – Chronic Muscatitis – which if untreated will lead to even greater illness.