The signs are all around us, which is perhaps why we miss them. All the hints are as conspicuous as a bride wearing ermine in a nudist colony. We just need to understand what they’re hinting.
Firstly, the government is careful not to improve conditions of media freedom still reeling from the killing by car bomb of a journalist they described as their harshest critic. Reform bills in parliament are kept off the floor for years. An inquiry’s set of recommendations are still ignored. A package of promised reforms remains a closely guarded secret. A committee to analyse those promised reforms includes people who argue the media should be restrained rather than liberated.
Secondly, institutions that are supposed to be independent of government are held on a tight leash. In the prime minister’s words, judges must act in a way that does not alienate his confidence. The chilling ‘or else’ is kept unfinished. Ombudsmen, parliamentary officers, civil servants of conscience, to the extent there are any left, can expect public onslaughts from Castille or from Parliament House or, worst of all, from Super One and their thousands of bloodthirsty followers.
Thirdly, the government will tolerate only one orthodoxy. Any departure and criticism will earn dissenters the explicit ire of ‘the people’s representatives’. The government whip’s speech this week is but the latest in a coordinated assault on journalists, magistrates, civil society leaders: enemies of the people, all. Instead of whipping his MPs, which should be his job in a functioning democracy, Glenn Bedingfield whips the less enthusiastic worshippers of his party’s enforced congregation.
Fourthly, and as Evarist Bartolo put it in one of his public fits of gut-punching insincerity, the law for us animals does not apply for Joseph Muscat’s pantheon of immune, criminal gods that continue to avoid justice under Robert Abela’s protective wing.
Fifthly, our education services are kept leaderless, demotivated, steered by party loyalists whose most prominent qualification is manifest incompetence. Bartolo. Owen Bonnici. Justyne Caruana. How better can a government ensure a perpetuation of a dumbed down population eager to support them?
Sixthly, if it looks like a parliamentary democracy, perhaps we’ll think it still is one. Like the senate under Nero, however, our parliament is a sycophantic farce, rubber-stamping the government’s uninhibited will, habitually humiliated and ritually intimidated, ridiculed to impress on the public its futility. Consider Konrad Mizzi, who uses parliament as his urinal and doesn’t bother to aim.
When people feel their vote is useless, people decide democracy is not for them- Manuel Delia
Seventhly, government is conducted without restraint, bereft of embarrassment from scandal. Public procurement rules apply only when they work for the government’s friends. Frugality, or, at least, a measure of proportion and responsibility, is discarded in favour of lavish spending on spectacle and grotesque waste. A million euros are not enough to spend on a night celebrating a film industry on which the government spends less than half that amount throughout the year. That’s just a recent example.
Eighthly, human rights are optional. Three teenage boys are on trial for their lives because they were the only English speakers in a boatload of desperate refugees escaping slavery and a cruel death. Their modest heroism is branded piracy. Meanwhile, a retired army colonel, who was removed from the management of the civil prison after running it like a gulag, is deployed to work with the militias in Libya to keep slaves in their place.
Ninthly, the country is officially run on the corporatist model designed by national socialists. The prime minister publicly urged business owners that fell afoul of the law to secretly contact him directly on WhatsApp, where no paper trail is kept, so he fixes their problems. Conveniently, the next sentence that starts with ‘in return’ is left incomplete, in public at least.
Tenthly, popularity trumps everything and sins are forgiven by popular acclaim. Consider the quick-fire rehabilitation of Rosianne Cutajar, disgraced receiver of undeclared cash gifts from an alleged journalist-killer one month, overseer of national health policy two months later. All it takes are a set of embarrassingly tender photos with the prime minister on social media and a crate of oranges distributed to old people’s homes in the constituency.
Eleventhly, plebiscitary policymaking. That’s how Mussolini and fellow tyrants wielded power: by reducing executive authority, judicial decisions and constitutional mechanics to be subservient to a loud and angry crowd angrily stabbing the air. When the filth of corruption and bad administration constipates this country, a thumping election campaign unclogs the drains. All sins are forgiven by an election. Soon Muscat, Mizzi, Keith Schembri and their handler, Abela will be raising glasses to their freedom again.
Twelfthly, the rot of dynastic politics. Some scoff at names like Fenech Adami, Hyzler, de Marco, Mifsud Bonnici, fathers and sons in politics that looks hereditary. Except sons in those cases only stepped in after fathers had stepped out. Consider Castille today, run like Nero’s palace – son, father, wife, sister-in-law, the dramas of deference of monarchy in a republic where civil servants theoretically promoted on merit stand politely behind the walls of genetics and marriage.
Thirteenthly, voter ennui, even helplessness, as more people with good reason to be dissatisfied with government find themselves unable to think of ways they can bring about change. The notions that the opposition is weak, that small parties are non-starters, that founding new parties is an alternative to the lunatic asylum have acquired dogmatic status. When people feel their vote is useless, people decide democracy is not for them.
We’ll have an election in a few weeks’ time. Don’t let the paraphernalia of balloting fool you into thinking that all’s well with this democracy.