Swinging in the void

Malta's membership of the European Union remains an opportunity to observe an enduring example of what is so sadly funny within Malta's political life.

The two main political parties compete furiously to ensure that, both within their own ranks as well as with regard to each other. The Labour Party is in a mess created by its leader. If any confirmation was necessary he gave it in unmistakable terms by the manner he has leapt to his own defence. He shot off a series of articles to claim consistency over the EU, to pooh-pooh making any U-turn or - worse - of having taken his voters for a ride in his anti-EU membership campaign, the latest phase of which was 1998 to the March 2003 referendum and, as if that was not enough, in the rush to lose a general election Labour could and should have won hands down.

Significantly, Alfred Sant wrote his recommendation of self-justification in Maltese, hosted by l-Orizzont, which offers space for a range of differing views. The peg for the Labour leader's efforts, even if not explicitly stated, was the threat from his predecessor's insistence to think and act logically. Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici was unambiguously anti-membership, a position - he had believed - that put him in the same boat as his successor as party leader.

His logic is simple and crystal-clear. If EU membership was bad before the election, so much so that Labour was led to crusade against it, not just oppose it, leaving it to the electorate to decide, it could not turn into a goodie because Labour was defeated. Dr Mifsud Bonnici's premise is not merely his own rabidly anti-EU position, one he has always held, at times expressing it in terms that demeaned him. It is that the Labour Party was led to present membership as inherently harmful in economic and political terms, and as going against the very principles of the party.

That position, the retired Labour leader implicitly argues, cannot be altered by electoral defeat. Not, that is, unless those who were led to believe it had been taken for a ride by leaders who were not genuine in the first place. He pressed on with his determination to persuade Labour supporters, and in particular party delegates, that Labour should commit itself to renegotiate the terms of membership as soon as it was returned to office.

For the pain of his logic, the ex-Labour leader and premier was not only pilloried as a Don Quixote tilting at windmills, as an Islamic-type fundamentalist embarking on a Jihad, a local unholy version of a holy war. His successor, for whom he had gone to all lengths in 1992 to see at the helm of the party, levelled at him the same charge as that made by the Nationalists who have vilified Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici for so many years.

Dr Sant argued that to follow KMB's line - to commit the party to renegotiating - would be to commit it to leave the EU, and thereby inflict untold harm on Malta's economic and civil society. He accused Dr Mifsud Bonnici of diluting his own anti-membership efforts in the CNI by leaving its headship to join Dom Mintoff's "chimeric" new scheme, a front to rouse Malta (beginning - the earlier former Leader made amply clear - his own once-Socialist party)

Dr sant's resort to open warfare with Dr Mifsud Bonnici, despite the perfunctory veneer of mutual respect, is very understandable from where he stands. For there can be little doubt, whatever the outcome of his efforts at the November general conference of the MLP, that the former leader has exposed a nerve that cannot be more raw among many widespread supporters. Five months after the humiliation at the general election, many Labourites still cannot understand what has happened.

They are bewildered that they were led to hold the EU as hell's den devil incarnate, but now the party is led to fit into it. So much so that, in a move that verges on terribly bad theatre, it is accepting the Labour rose be adorned with the European Union stars.

That comes across like black slapstick. Few bother to read into the cleverness of as-soon-as-possible getting out of the way those lumps in the new pudding that will show the folly of the manner the anti-EU membership campaign was cooked. That, few can as yet begin to forget, led to the horrible indigestion of another bad electoral defeat, condemning the Labour Party to a further five years in opposition.

The current Labour leader, who authored that script, though he apparently felt after the election debacle that it was his ex-deputy's name, George Vella, that was associated with it, not his own, has most to lose of there is support for Dr Mifsud Bonnici's motion, should it get to the party's annual general conference in November. That is why Dr Sant put in his relentless effort to dismantle Dr Mifsud Bonnici's credibility and simultaneously try to restore and build up his own in plain Maltese. He did that not even in the party's Maltese language Sunday paper, but in l-Orizzont, which is the mass-circulation paper the party's delegates read during the week.

The sadly funny aspect of all this is that it will serve Alfred Sant's skin again by throwing Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici's logic out, but without any public recognition of, much less regret for, the misshapen strategy that lost Labour the election. That strategy has turned out to be no more than a chimera, in its accepted meaning a vain and foolish fancy signifying the impossible.

"Can a chimera, swinging in the void, swallow second intentions?" someone once asked in cruel jest. I doubt that Dr Mifsud Bonnici will be so cruel as to use and build on that line. Don Quixote, after all, was a kind man, even if the former Labour leader has not been that kind in the manner he has responded so far to the sharp barbs from Dr Sant.

If it were not so sad, it would be hilarious.

The nationalists are rubbing their hands with unmitigated glee at the discord that persists within the Labour Party over the EU issue. While they have their fun they fail to ponder over their own sad situation on that same count. It is exemplified in various ways.

The verbal clash within the Labour ranks, at least, demonstrates that there is life after political death. The party, as it has been led, lost the issue and, because it had not left it to the democratic mechanism of a referendum, the general election. Thus died the hopes of so many thousands of Labourites, as well as of many others who recognised there was a dire need for a change - the Nationalist administrators, whatever their merits or otherwise, had very clearly shot their bolt.

Yet the ability to think and speak out openly, severely restricted though it always has been, did not die as well. Whether one agrees or not with the various positions and utterances, there are different Labour views. That they clash openly is healthy and threaten no one but those who foolishly wove vain policies and now swing in the void and have to swallow second in intentions in order to touch firm ground once more, even if they spin like never before to mask their indignity and lost credibility.

The clash and contrast of ideas is the essence of democratic debate. The hilarity of the Nationalists at the sound of the Labour discomfort cannot hide the fact that Nationalist Party comes across as a monolith, a party with one mind, one view. Mirth that, from time to time, differing views burst in the open on the Labour side does not do away with gravity of lack of open discussion outside the high walls of the Nationalist citadel. It is impossible that there is unanimity within the ranks of Nationalist MPs and kernel of activists, even over evolution of the relationship Malta has and will be having within the EU.

That glimpses emerge years later, as in the biography of Dr Censu Tabone, or are swiftly suffused on the rare occasions that they do so now is a sad reflection on the democratic trappings of the PN.

In having to close ranks so tightly and to keep more tight-lipped, the Nationalists prove right those within the Labour ranks who are intolerant of any airing of contrasting views. That is hardly something to make one giggle.

In contrast, it is sadly funny how the Nationalist top man and prime minister is spearheading a new offensive against the Labour Party over the fact that it has killed the chimera its leader had saddled it with, is accepting the democratic reality of EU membership and preparing to working within it.

That the Labour leader spins for all he is worth to try to erase from the party memory the doomed strategy he had followed despite what the party's own opinion polls were telling it, does not alter the fact that there is now a bipartisan policy towards the EU, though in the correct context of at times contrasting views and stances.

Funnily enough that degree of bipartisanship is precisely what Dr Fenech Adami used to say he hoped for. That is also what he called for in a statesmanlike address after the election result, when he managed the rare feat of rising above partisan politics. Now he is mired back in it. At the same time, on and off he still calls for a common approach to the island's problems.

Such contradictions may turn politics into an amusing game of irony. But, amusing to whom? Certainly not to those who want Maltese society to progress, to pull together as can be together into the future. Nor do these contradictions and resumed baiting of the Labour Party dissolve away the growing and broad-based view that the government seems to have written a one act script for the country.

At the end of that act, with issue of membership settled, the Nationalist government appears to have no other plot to follow.

All of that is not what a relationship of membership of the EU, or of any club that deals in the challenging realities of domestic, regional and international life is supposed to be about. Those who believed before, or now accept membership surely hope for a start from a basic point of common political decency and seriousness. Eddie Fenech Adami and Alfred Sant are not contributing to it, whether individually or together.

They simply confirm again and again and again that they are a duo determined to tangle, not to tango to a national score. Again and again, they leave the national interest to swing in the void.