There was a time when ‘village’ was a dubious attributive noun to add to ‘politics’. The pairing brought to mind shabbily-dressed men shuffling between the każin tal-banda (band club) and the titotla (tea shop), only breaking the routine for the occasional top-level summit in a corner of the sacristy.

The issues of the day would include which type of bunting to put up at which corner of the square at the festa, the choice of a treasurer for the club, a dispute over bell ringing that had raged on since 1925, and such. In this sense, ‘village politics’ stood for a type of politics to do with festa and its satellites.

But there was a second, slightly less quaint, sense. The village politician was one whose reach, in terms of both support and relevance, was largely limited to the village square and the few streets that led from it.

The local doctor and lawyer were prime candidates for the job, for obvious reasons. In most cases, the village politician would double as the president of some local band club or other.

The reason why ‘village politician’ was not a compliment had to do with its baggage of pettiness, narrow-mindedness and parochialism. The term was the antithesis of statesmanship.

Daphne Caruana Galizia once called Eddie Fenech Adami a village lawyer. What she meant was that, given his background and image, he was unlikely material for statesmanship. I can completely see why she was right, at the time.

She had no way of knowing that that image was to become his greatest asset. As it happened, it didn’t take long for Fenech Adami’s unimpeachably-statesmanlike qualities to emerge.

The ace was the ease with which he commuted between the two poles. It transformed the Nationalist Party from a club for Italianate nostalgics and wayward Stricklandjani into a hegemonic force that could do things like welfare, convincingly.

Back to our hypothetical village politician. They might make it to Parliament, of course. But even then, their contribution would be limited to punting for the various local causes that gave them the seat in the first place.

A light bulb here and a bench there, and that seat was safe. In other words, the highest ambition of the village politician was to be a successful broker between locals and the State.

Little wonder then that the type was something of an anthropologist’s wet dream. The trigger was patronage, that system in which local patrons cultivated local clients (and vice versa) to lop-sided real or imagined benefit.

Jeremy Boissevain had the time of his life writing about it. I can only imagine how excited he must have felt when he first heard the proverb ‘mingħajr qaddisin ma titlax il-ġenna’ (‘one cannot get to heaven without the help of saints’).

Village politicians live on in the same way as the coelacanth does, as survivors from an earlier age.

We are now a networked society in which village patrons and their local magic must compete with and lose out to Facebook and such technical mastery. In any case, Malta is so built up that it resembles one city rather than a bunch of villages. Oliver Friggieri, I think, calls it a city-state.

Wrong, if recent currents are anything to go by. I refer in particular to the ‘Gvern li jisma’ (‘a government that listens’) series of public consultations that are currently being held all over the island. Flip through the pages of this newspaper and you are likely to come across an advert or 10.

The artwork of these adverts itself is very telling. It shows a stylised Maltese village square, with narrow streets leading to an open space dominated by a church and what looks like a local council building.

There are no band clubs and no people, and the whole thing looks rather like an advert for old-country cheddar or Prince Charles’s Poundbury, but never mind.

The point is that these public consultations are being sold on the strength of their readiness to engage with the Maltese village. Which is odd, given what I’ve just said about the implications of that. How is it possible that government ministers seem happy to parade themselves as latter-day village politicians? Is this a case of the saints marching back in?

The reason why ‘village politician’ was not a compliment had to do with its baggage of pettiness, narrow-mindedness and parochialism

Perhaps not, for three reasons. First, the product doesn’t quite match the advert. Cheddarland notwithstanding, the consultations are not actually being held in village squares.

The spaces chosen for the job (sports halls and such) are, in fact, rather more secular. Certainly it is unlikely the belfries will ever cast their shadows over the gatherings, however much John Bundy would have us believe they will in the television version of the adverts.

Second, there is a word that rescues politicians from the attributive noun. That word is ‘community’. As the Prime Minister’s spokesman put it the other day, this is an occasion for government ministers to “mix with the community” (“jinżlu fil-komunità”). Cringeometers off for a minute, the sleight is fascinating.

It tells of a shift in political language that posits the State as a kind of community of common interests. Tony Blair did it many years ago as part of his Third Way neither-here-nor-there programme.

The snag is that it is hard to figure out where exactly this new-found community might reside. At which point the old village squares pop up, hopefully rid of their negative connotations.

Third, the squares themselves have been revalued as worthy candidates for events of all sorts. In part this was due to the setting up of local councils and the coming of age of a secular politics of locality. I would also include the various events (strawberry feast in Mġarr, chocolate in Ħamrun, and so on) that invite people to value the village in secular ways. Tradition is being used to break with tradition, so to say.

So it is, after all, a case of the saints marching back in – only without their halos. Whether or not it is possible to have the village but not its politics remains to be seen.

mafalzon@hotmail.com