I read something the other day about academics – well, three of them – declaring how terrible it was that the Opposition was “weak, fragile, and inherently broken”, and how necessarily it was for the country to have strong parties led by strong leaders. (Not Adrian Delia’s PN, that is.)
The easiest thing to say about the factional conflict in the PN is that it’s bad for us all. That’s because, as the academic wisdom goes, the country needs a strong Opposition – with a capital ‘O’, tellingly. In this case, a strong and united PN is needed to keep the Labour government in check and fight the abuse of power.
Self-evident, on the face of it, and as such hardly worth saying. Except it’s worse. It is, in fact, a piece of vacant rhetoric, and one hopelessly cast in the bipartisan concrete. It’s also oblivious to recent political events that show that it’s quite possible to have a strong opposition but not an Opposition, thank you very much.
It’s as cutting edge an idea as shoulder pads and Space Invaders, really. In the 1980s, anyone who opposed the Labour government, for whatever reason, was effectively a Nationalist.
I remember wondering why all the adults around me who were environmentalists, or who were involved in the Church schools resistance, or who had a taste for chocolate, were Nationalist.
Except they weren’t, at least not in the family-legacy sense of the word. (Many came from Labour families and had voted Labour in the 1970s.) The reasons why the PN became such a meeting ground were many.
One was Eddie Fenech Adami, who was skilful and uncharismatically charismatic enough to position the party as the only viable means of opposition. Another had to do with the logistics of politics at the time, which made it difficult for anyone to oppose effectively except as part of a strong and centralised party machine. Point is, the Granaries were the opposition was the Granaries.
The 1980s, then, were the high noon of bipartisan politics. They were a time when you were either a Nationalist or a Labourite, or Gone Fishing. For their part, a generation of academics projected the model into a timeless past and busied themselves wondering if it was a Mediterranean syndrome, a national trait, or perhaps one endemic to small islands.
In the 1980s, the person who was to become arguably Malta’s strongest ever prime minister was still in Form IIC.
Eddie Fenech Adami was skilful and charismatic enough to position the party as the only viable means of opposition
Thirty years on, Joseph Muscat’s majority was – is, but you know what I mean – Invictus, tkaxkira (a rout), and the rest. So Titanically titanium was it, that it all went down very quickly. The peak of Muscat’s political career coincided with his departure from politics, disgraced.
A Space Invaders mindset might suppose that it must have taken a formidable Opposition to do the trick.
An Opposition so mighty and united and strongly led, it applied for permission to extend the Granaries.
But no. Muscat was brought down by forces other than l-eluf minn tagħkom bil-bnadar magħkom (a line from the PN anthem). A woman with a laptop, and her assassination, had a lot to do with it, as did a seemingly ragtag chorus of voices and the international alliances and support they built and cultivated.
No hyperbole intended, but shall we say that it was the most significant and consequential political moment of the last couple of decades?
Shall we also say that it happened in spite of, not because of, the PN?
So much for the country’s need of a strong and united Opposition, then. The black-on-white facts show that it is possible to keep government in check, and to fight the abuse of power – and let us not be plus ça change about this, what was achieved was quite astonishing – without as much as a coffee down at the Stamperija.
That helps me clear some puzzlement of my own. In recent weeks I’ve found myself trying very hard to care about the leadership crisis in the PN. Except the more I tried the less I cared, and that’s not because I’m gone fishing.
I do actually feel strongly about Azerbaijan and Montenegro and the assassination of Daphne and the rest of the long list, and I hope I have in my own small way added a voice.
I now understand that the reason why I don’t much care about the War of the Stamperija Succession is that opposition and the Opposition are two entirely different things, and that it’s possible to have one without the other.
There’s more. A strong and united PN would probably not have brought down Muscat and his cronies.
It would have promised us a bright future under a PN government. See-saw politics, in other words – or, if you prefer, the timeless Mediterranean small-island bipartisan world of academics.
Gandhi once said that he didn’t much care whether or not India was ruled by the British. He did, however, profoundly care about whether or not it was ruled justly.
I now see what he meant. Give me a thousand years of Labour, opposed in a sustained and effective way by whoever, over the old seesaw.
Funny, isn’t it?
Today’s public intellectuals (or, well, some of them) spend their time telling us how we must move away from bipartisan politics towards a future underwritten by civil society and the shifting alliances of a fluid opposition. Except when we do, they withdraw to the facile certainties of a strong and united Opposition.