At this time of the year, I try to tone down my political writing and focus on penning something that might help the readers prepare, for believers and unbelievers alike, for the Christmas season. Only last Sunday, I told a friend, while exiting St John’s Co-Cathedral after mass, that even my social media accounts are tamer than usual and planned to keep it that way at least until after the New Year.

Be careful what you wish for. While taking a coffee break at work, I opened my Facebook account, as one does, to check the latest and the first item that popped up was Jason Azzopardi’s status that he has been arrested for allegedly filming the prime minister and the minister of justice in the halls of the law courts. I had to read it three times because my brain could not compute.

First off, because this seems so disproportionate when one considers that high-powered politicians and their hangers-on have yet to be arrested and charged in court for their crimes and misdemeanors, and, secondly, I was under the impression that Robert Abela likes to be filmed while preening for the cameras, especially when lifting weights in a gym, wearing his lurid ‘Arani, Ma!’ lurex sportswear and the expression of a failed Rodin thinker.

Abela likes to think that he is a strongman-type politician but he is actually a lightweight who runs to daddy when brave people like Azzopardi and Robert Aquilina hold him to account. But, like all populist bullies, he lets other people do the dirty work for him.

Like the intrepid minister of justice, a misnomer if there ever was one, Attard, who wasted court time and resources to arraign an enemy of the state for allegedly filming a five-second clip of himself and the prime minister huddled in a corner after receiving a stinging sentence regarding Vitals, which they had hoped to win.

So sure were they that they were going to win the case that people who were there observed a group of around 50 government apparatchiks enter the hall like the buffalo stampeding scene from The Lion King.

But none of that during the Azzopardi sitting.

While our plucky minister of justice was busy weaponising the law against an upstanding citizen, anger and disbelief were welling up inside me because, a few minutes before this sitting, Azzopardi stepped in to help a visibly distressed person who had been sitting in the corridor since noon, it was then close to four in the afternoon, who had asked for legal aid but was told that she must ask for it at her sitting.

So here we have the minister of justice who keeps bleating about reforming the justice system while, at the same time, piling it on with a frivolous case.

I swear that, while he was on the stand, I expected the prime minster to pop out from his pocket but, most probably, he was out jutting Johnny Bravo’s chin at Castille like the petulant child that he is.

In a very important book by Jan-Werner Müller, What is populism?, the author argues that populist leaders employ what he calls “discriminatory legalism”, which basically means ‘to my friends, everything, to my enemies the law’. And we witnessed that last Monday in court in the very person of the minister of justice whose remit is to see that the law is applied to everyone equally without fear and favour.

Double standards. Protection to my friends, to my enemies the full extent of the law

Besides his obvious dereliction of duty to apply the law to a list of Labour Party cronies like Michael Falzon, who always declares to suffer from bouts of convenient amnesia; Ian Borg for his alleged part in the licence racket; Anton Refalo, for having a piece of history poolside so he can gaze at it fondly while grilling sausages; Clayton Bartolo and his wife Amanda, for the phantom job he gave her; and Rosianne Cutajar, for the same accusation.

And the list goes on and on, not forgetting the disgraced former prime minister Joseph Muscat who was not arrested on charges for his part in the Vitals heist but was gently asked to present himself in court; one particular case where Jonathan Attard should have acted swiftly, but did not, was when Patrick Dalli, the husband of Helena Dalli, the former European commissioner, yelled out “Mafia” in open court in the direction of the judge after he meted out the sentence against him.

Double standards. Protection to my friends, to my enemies the full extent of the law.

Populists in power, Müller, goes on to say, believe that they are the only morally legitimate representatives of the people and, thus, this kind of thinking manifests itself in four distinct ways: a kind of colonisation of the state, mass clientelism, the discriminatory legalism already mentioned and, finally, the systematic repression of civil society and other dissenting voices.

We are in the season of Advent. A season of waiting and expectation. So a tentative observation can be still be made that might help us all to prepare for Christmas in this current climate of despair that has gripped our nation that no gaudy Christmas tree plonked in front of our parliament can assuage.

All of us can be recognised by our expectations, our moral and spiritual ‘stature’ may be measured by what our hopes are.

While the year swiftly draws to a close, we can all ask ourself: What am I expecting? On the communitarian and a national level? What unites our aspirations?

The expectation of the people of the Messiah before Christ’s birth lay in their hope that this figure, when he comes, would save them from moral and political slavery.

Hope is not only the reserve of believers. The nation is alive and thriving so long as we expect together, so long as hope remains alive, so long as we keep fighting to keep this hope for a better country alive in our hearts.

So when they go low, we go high.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all.

Alessandra Dee Crespo is a former vice president of Repubblika and an activist interested in human rights and social justice.