Political marketing has been honed into a precise science that parties master to satisfy the needs and wishes of the electorate. Once elected, a political party needs to deliver on its promises. However, when making excessive pre-election promises, parties create a credibility gap when some promises prove impossible to implement.
The marketing flagship of the government must surely be the narrative of the “speech from the throne”, one penned by the Office of the Prime Minister and delivered by President George Vella at the opening of parliament.
This year’s speech contained the familiar political rhetoric peppered with platitudes, understatements and occasional contradictions.
The headline message of the new administration is that it is time to “shift focus from infrastructure to environment”. The backdrop to this overdue prioritisation is decades of exploitation of the country’s urban and rural environment. However, there is still no robust commitment to respecting non-development zones that have long been subject to elastic demarcation lines. There seems to be no commitment to change the planning laws which literally uglified Malta.
We still have to see how responsibility to “ensure smart planning to safeguard our villages’ unique characteristics” will be interpreted by the Planning Authority, which has been so liberal in granting permits for development in village cores in the past several years.
The question of Malta’s neutrality is also one of the new administration’s top priorities. The president’s speech gave a fresh nuance to the concept of neutrality.
Vella argues that “Malta is neutral, but we cannot keep our eyes shut. Neutrality does not mean closing our eyes when faced with injustice and disgusting behaviour”. The undertones of these statements contrast with the pacifist rhetoric and the country’s stance of equidistance from the superpowers that was so popular in the 1970s and 1980s.
Gozo will always be a kingpin in local political marketing. The government wants to boost incentives to Gozo business by 10 per cent. A more credible commitment would have been to stop the overdevelopment on the island. In recent years, Gozo has been suffering from the same environmental exploitation that has afflicted Malta for so long.
As for tourism, the Malta Tourism Authority strategy document published last year lacked the genuine soul-searching that the industry needs to redefine its business model. The government seems to believe that the present policymakers who support the mass tourism concept are the right people to implement the tourism strategy for the “next eight years”.
One can only hope that the new challenges of high energy and food prices and escalating fuel costs that could impact airline fares will not continue to undermine the viability of mass tourism. The president’s speech also contained various tactical initiatives to fill the political marketing gap. These tactics include those aimed at promoting the creative economy, introducing carer’s leave and improving children’s access to extra-curricular activities.
The government’s flagship marketing document is light on some of the major issues: it fails to define meaningful plans for structural reforms to upgrade the country’s perennially underperforming education system, tackle the growing problem of poverty, reduce dependence on low-paid imported labour and address slow-burning issues, like obesity and the strain this puts on the health system.
The superficial platitudes in the president’s speech do not fill the gap in the political strategy for the coming five years.
The present threat of stagflation in the EU might well force the government to make new choices and take unpopular measures in the months to come.
One can expect new editions of the government’s plans for the next five years.