An apocryphal story: President Abraham Lincoln has been fatally shot in his theatre box and a family friend is eager to take Mrs Lincoln’s mind off the tragedy – “But, putting to one side the assassination, how was the evening?”
There’s something of this naivety in trying to assess Joseph Muscat’s legacy, as Prime Minister, while bracketing Daphne Caruana Galizia’s assassination.
It’s not just that so many trails appear to lead to Castille. Caruana Galizia was more than a harsh critic of Muscat’s government. Her investigative stories – many of them confirmed – throw a revealing light on Muscat’s modus operandi. She furnished damning information about his signal projects – including the Electrogas power station, the Vitals Global Healthcare hospitals deal and passport sales.
If she was assassinated because of one or more of these projects, the violence becomes an intrinsic part of his reign. Weakened forces of law were not investigating the revelations. Government backbench MPs, moonlighting as the Executive’s employees, had an incentive to look the other way. The crooks felt free to eliminate the threat. If that’s the way it went, the problem was systemic. This issue comes up again and again in assessing Muscat’s programme. The collapsing buildings, the loss of correspondent banks, the power cuts... Bug or feature?
Isolated accidents or are they the logical results of systemic deregulation (or non-enforcement) and corruption, with necessary checks and balances removed to spur short-term economic growth?
It’s too soon to tell for sure. The economic figures show a complex picture.
But we are in a better position to assess what’s happened to liberty in the last seven years.
The last Nationalist administration underestimated the importance of dignity when faced with demands for divorce legislation and formal LGBT marriage and adoption rights.
It assumed that informal arrangements, private contracts and welfare provision were enough. The party that prides itself on standing for the dignity of the person forgot that people don’t just want the power to organise their private lives as they see fit. They also want their choices to be publicly recognised with the dignity of ceremony.
Divorce entered under a reluctant Nationalist administration but it was Muscat’s support that was vital for the referendum victory. Then, as prime minister, he made sure that LGBT marriage and adoption rights were secured. None the less, his conception of liberty proved to be flawed.
Muscat was fine with liberty as long as it means no State interference in private lives. But personal liberty stopped there. Beyond it, Muscat’s government behaved as though it could steamroll its way in all areas of public life.
In mature democracies, liberty also has to do with the restraints of good governance, rule of law and the dispersal of power. Under Muscat, rules became non-binding. Power was centralised. Decisions were ad hoc and arbitrary.
It’s no coincidence that free speech was systemically twisted to mean the right of State officials and advisers to target public critics. They were not one-off cases. The Labour Party has online troops led by colonels working within the Office of the Prime Minister.
Free speech, of course, is a right invoked by ordinary people against the State. The other way round is a sign of authoritarianism, which resents any challenge to its authority to act in the public sphere.
The right to free assembly was also looked at with hostility. OPM officials have been observed taking photographs at public protests. And police sources have admitted that surveillance material gathered in the interests of public order has sometimes been “misused”.
It’s one thing for a prime minister to want to operate untrammelled; it’s another for civil society to allow it. How could it happen?
His legacy will not be the development of a new Malta
These days, the emphasis is on the Constitution and the scope it gives prime ministers. Others blame Malta’s public culture. No doubt these factors deserve some weight. But I think that economic changes have also played a part.
The principle of political accountability in a democracy is no taxation without representation. Under Muscat, people continued to be taxed but income tax was lowered while government revenues relied a great deal on revenues from foreign sources: financial services, gaming, passport sales.
An economy that relies significantly on foreign rents is likely to soften its attitude towards government accountability. The overheads of clientelism and bloated government employment aren’t paid for by higher taxes, at least not in the boom years.
Corruption always exacts a price but it can be ignored if average income is rising. Like Silvio Berlusconi before him, Muscat managed to make the various conflicts of interest in his administration seem like a convergence of interests. Many ordinary people became landlords to foreigners. Financial services providers could profit from passport sales that undermined the industry’s reputation. Cronies profited from environmental havoc but so did ordinary people.
To be clear, the economic move to gather rents from financial services and gaming was begun under previous Nationalist administrations. Both political parties of government reflexively offer economic proposals based on commoditising Malta’s legislation (regulatory sandboxing) – rents from innovative growth areas.
The conditions enabling a weakening of political accountability pre-existed Muscat. Not only for constitutional reasons but for economic ones. Malta’s trajectory from Independence seems to be, in retrospect, a transformation from a strategic military base to a strategic regulatory base. In both cases there is a bias towards an illiberal public sphere.
Still, Muscat pushed what he found to the limits. We have yet to see if, given the international reputational damage he’s inflicted, he has stretched the limits to breaking point.
In any case, there’s no doubt that his legacy will not be the development of a new Malta. The clientelism, the construction boom, the rents – these are the flourishing of classic Malta. The only issue is whether what we’re seeing is its zenith or swansong.
ranierfsadni@europe.com