Seventeen years after EU membership, Malta finds itself in a curious position. In a recent poll, from among the EU-27, membership got the highest endorsement from the Maltese polled; every EU-budget negotiation has gone very well for Malta. And, yet, we are heading towards a general election where it’s clear that Labour and the Nationalist Party will both be warning us about how bad it can get – if the other is voted in.
“How bad can it get?” That’s quite a turnaround from the general elections of 2003, 2008 and 2017, each fought, in their different ways, on the opposite question: “How good can it get?”
Nor is asking how bad it can get just a sloganeering one. My impression is that most voters, like most commentators, take it to be the most natural question to ask.
The PN and Labour (and their respective critics) don’t mean the same thing by the question, of course.
For the PN, the question means: will a third Labour term send the country back to the worst of the 1980s, with thug rule, eroded political freedoms and a stagnant economy?
For Labour, the question will be made to mean something else. The general election will presumably be called once the vaccination programme is effectively completed and the economy has reopened, with a feel-good factor palpable.
Labour’s strategy will, therefore, be to ask voters if they want to risk the reviving economy by entrusting government to the PN, which, Labour will claim, has forgotten how to govern well, assuming it ever did at all.
If you think the question is natural, how did we get here? It’s not natural at all.
Anyone under 60 today can reasonably expect to see, in their lifetime, a minor golden age for law and order, healthcare and education. (Yes, that assumes humanity doesn’t destroy itself or its habitat; bear with me.)
Surveillance technology will swing the pendulum of detection in favour of police forces. The speed with which the perpetrators of the Sliema double-murder were identified and caught (and one extradited from Spain) simply by using surveillance cameras along their escape route – that’s just a harbinger of what’s possible when the police are doing their jobs.
In healthcare, the current possibilities of telemedicine and preventive care are nothing compared to what will be possible when medicine can be, literally, individualised, based on knowledge of enzymes and brain states.
In education, any student with access to YouTube can watch a lecture given by a world expert on a subject. It’s only a matter of time before the world of entertainment teams up with that of education to produce online services that captivate interest and also accredited. The implications for what that would mean for in-person teaching are profound.
In housing, we are seeing the first people move into homes created by 3D printing. In the Netherlands, a house of 96 square metres was built in five days at below-average cost.
All these developments are double-edged. Each opens up a gap between what can be done (breaking present constraints) and what should be done (voluntary restraint) – the area typically occupied by politics.
Responsible politicians address the challenges ahead by combining the principled view with the concrete- Ranier Fsadni
We are already facing questions about the limits of surveillance and what is done with facial recognition data. Advances in reproduction technology have raised similar questions about the limits of what should be permissible. But these are just the start.
There are specific questions about who should have access by right – and at what cost to the state.
If houses become cheaper to build, how strong should the right to housing be? And what would constitute a proper house in the post-COVID age? (Would office space be mandatory since people will be expected to work from home more often?)
If the cost of post-secondary education falls, what would that mean for rights to life-long learning, not least for people whose jobs are insecure? Who bears the cost? What would it mean for taxation?
None of these questions are technocratic. They’re political because they require an ability to tax, to prioritise and to invest heavily in a way that the private sector never will.
They call for a vision of society that cannot be purely national. Some changes and developments will call for concerted European action and, therefore, a vision for one kind of Europe or another.
Responsible politicians address the challenges ahead by combining the principled view with the concrete. If you wish to understand how the German Greens have got within sight of winning the general election in September, look up their manifesto of principles, where they are not afraid to articulate contentious views, based on principle, and spelling out – in general terms, not promises – what it would mean for rights, taxes and European cooperation.
If, on the other hand, you want to familiarise yourself with how to wash your hands of politics – understood as a vision of how to deal with real radical challenges – then look no further than the two parties asking us to entrust them with government.
The PN has just published a document on its vision for 2030 that is a salad of verbiage. It adds up to saying that the PN will make sure everything is sustainable, digitised and top quality. All the contentious issues – how, for whom, in what order, what’s excluded – are left out.
Labour isn’t any better. On May 1, our prime minister managed to avoid mentioning Europe and his idea of addressing workers was to thank them, as though they worked for him, rather than review the political challenges for workers in national, European and global context.
And then people say we’re plagued by too much politics? We have too little.