Silvio Parnis didn’t have an easy life in politics. He was a politician of a kind that was becoming extinct at the moment when he made his entry into public life.
From what I am told, since I didn’t happen to know him personally, the same was with the late Robert Arrigo. Both were politicians with both feet in the community. They understood their role as intermediaries between power and the communities they hailed from.
What drove them was a sense of mission, that of making a difference, of being helpful to alleviate the woes of men and women who literally crossed their paths on a daily basis.
They were not particularly ambitious to reach the high echelons of their respective parties; in Arrigo’s case, he admitted publicly that he submitted his name for the deputy leadership of the Nationalist Party only with a sense of duty after it suffered a second consecutive defeat in 2017.
For Parnis, whom I happened to know, his brand of socialism was very simple: the disadvantaged and the needy cannot await for the state’s intricate bureaucracy to wake up to their adversities, they need immediate intervention to better their lives and Parnis put himself as their champion before the state and the private sector when necessary.
There was no grand theory behind his actions, except perhaps the precepts of Christian doctrine kids of his generation picked up at their local MUSEUM and Dom Mintoff’s populist creed that Christ was “the world’s first socialist”.
From that perspective, being a good Christian was equivalent to being a good socialist and, as I remember him, Parnis tried to be both.
At a time when the professional classes were about to take over almost completely the national sphere of Maltese politics and, in the process, impose a model for doing politics more inspired by the management of a private enterprise than from a sense of public service, people like Parnis often appeared to be out of synch with this ‘modern’ way of being a politician.
They were shunned by the party elite, deemed to be good only to rally public support and, through their personal connections, get out the voters at election time.
Their political contribution diminished. Sneered at behind their backs, they remained faithful to their commitment towards their sense of mission and their ideals.
Their frustration was at the lack of empathy they found towards their causes from where help should have been forthcoming.
During his last, very emotional speech to the Nationalist Party’s general council, Arrigo spoke about how much he had to suffer being cruelly sidelined despite his high position within the party.
Little did it count that he was still a successful businessman, a very popular and much loved politician – his commitment to the community branded him as passé with the ‘modernist’ hegemony at the helm of the party.
Politicians should measure their success by the transformative impact they have had on the least member of the community- Aleks Farrugia
During the past couple of decades, both parties have distanced themselves from communities, which is quite ironic given how many within their parliamentary ranks have started their political career at local council level. It almost beggars belief that once in parliament these ex-councillors have themselves contributed towards the role of local councils to be reduced almost to insignificance.
Turning themselves away from communities, parties no longer even seem interested in finding candidates that represent those communities within their fold. Instead, they have become increasingly reliant upon their marketing strategists to import unknown political entities and half-baked celebrities and transform them into star candidates.
Despite having been the front line at grassroots level and the first political school for many activists at different levels in the past, local committees suddenly lost their importance. Każini, once a centre of political activity within the community, have become money-making opportunities to lease and turn into fashionable cafeterias and restaurants or to sell and make up for the party’s debt.
It is very telling that most of the top officials today have no history within their own party. Many of them were implanted there by a ruling oligarchy, an incestuous affair between a closed group holding the deciding power all for themselves, without having climbed the ranks of the party, without having laboured alongside the activists or spent enough time to humanly feel close to the grassroots they are supposed to represent.
They have no sense of the heritage that each of our political parties has, no awareness of tradition or the values that throughout history – with all its ups and downs – have shaped a nation.
Political parties need policymakers, people who have a long-term, wide-ranging vision to propel the party and the country towards the future.
They also need able administrators who can turn ideas into concrete deliverables, who can manage with efficiency and efficacy.
But policymakers and administrators will turn the party into a bureaucracy enclosed in its own bubble if there aren’t among them politicians who champion the community, who were raised in the community and for whom the community is not some abstract entity but individuals with a name, an address and a life.
Different from a private enterprise, the business of politics is not just concerned with those who have the means to engage. Politicians should measure their success by the transformative impact they have had on the least member of the community.
Because the business of politics is the overall (and, therefore, not just material) well-being of the polis, the polis cannot be truly well if such well-being is not justly distributed among the community.
Justice is always partial to those who are wronged. And being left out of the generated well-being is one way of being wronged.
That is why we need politicians like Parnis who make it their mission to remind power of the ones who are wronged.
Rather than being ‘old school’, they are that kind of politician that is needed to bring back empathy and justice to politics.