Editorial: Robert Abela’s ugliest populist turn

Labour had many ways of criticising the Nationalist Party’s tax cut promise. On Saturday, Prime Minister Robert Abela chose to use the ugliest one of all.

Addressing a Labour rally, Abela proudly declared that his government’s €1,000 ‘super bonus’ pledge had been meticulously designed to exclude some 100,000 foreign workers. He contrasted this with the Nationalist Party’s alternative, which he framed as a failure for failing to ring-fence the benefit for Maltese nationals alone.

Abela told supporters that it had taken “months” of work by legal and technical experts to find a way of locking these workers out of the benefit.

There is something deeply unsavoury about a political leader making such a boast. This was not a reluctant clarification of fiscal constraints; Abela was not telling people that the benefit was restricted to Maltese because we couldn’t afford otherwise. He was presenting it as a political achievement.

Abela was telling his base that he had gone to considerable lengths to ensure that many of their neighbours – people who live here, pay taxes here, and drive the very economy the government relies upon – are treated as second-class citizens.

The Labour Party has historically championed the cause of the worker.

Yet, in Abela’s current political arithmetic, "the worker" is apparently defined by nationality or voting eligibility, rather than their contribution to the national purse. By dividing the workforce into 'deserving' and 'undeserving' taxpayers, the Prime Minister has effectively validated a narrative of resentment.

This is not just a Labour problem: the PN’s finance spokesperson has a complicated history of questionable statements and social media posts about overseas workers. Just last week he criticised Labour’s super bonus pledge by saying “it will attract foreigners”. 

This language carries consequences. Just last week, we witnessed xenophobic hostility directed at Labour candidate Omar Rababah by elements within the party’s own grassroots.

Such toxicity demanded a strong, principled rebuttal from the country’s leadership. Instead of quashing these base instincts, the Prime Minister chose to feed them.

There was no real need to even go there.

Abela’s other way of questioning the PN tax cut – by contrasting the simple arithmetic of Labour’s pledge to the convoluted way the PN has justified its calculations – is simple and clear.

There are also valid arguments to be made about only rewarding workers who choose to truly make Malta their home, rather than those treating it as a stepping stone.

But by framing the decision to exclude foreign workers as some sort of ‘win’ that took months of work to conjure up, Labour is pandering to the basest of emotions and driving politics to the fringes.

When our leaders speak like that so openly, it enables bad behaviour further down the chain. Is it any surprise that so many business owners abuse of their foreign workers, when the prime minister is openly boasting about bending over backwards to leave them out? 

The framing is part of a broader trend we have seen in local politics over the past years. Foreign workers are tolerated because they build the country, fuel our pension system and keep essential industries ticking over.

Without the thousands of foreign workers – particularly third-country nationals – brought into Malta under an economic model engineered by the Labour government itself, the thriving economy the same government so proudly boasts about simply would not exist.

But these same TCN workers must remain as invisible as possible, not heard or, god forbid, fairly compensated.

That is not social justice. It is, quite simply, hollow populism.