Editorial | Sunday, 28 December 2008

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A political class we deserve

MaltaToday’s front page today carries the enduring image of this year’s cliff-hanger election – a grief-stricken Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, bawling his heart out during a PN meeting in Mosta. To us, it represented the culmination of a soulless election which came to be defined by Labour’s frontal attack against the so called ‘green politician’, and the Nationalists’ successful attempt at thwarting the scandal by taking Pullicino Orlando’s side and turning him into a political martyr.
That fateful week in Malta’s political history spoke volumes about the way the political class has engineered how voters perceive truth and falsity.
While voters, and the media, are necessarily always searching for the objective truth in what politicians do, the sceptics among us would readily concede that truth and falsity are nothing but different facets of the same thing.
Indeed, it is often a perception that politicians feed their voters to suit their own ends: namely, power.
Such was the JPO saga that defined the 2008 election. In that week, the Labour media, somewhat ineptly and clumsily, gave the electorate irrefutable proof that Pullicino Orlando had rented out his land in pristine Mistra, to be developed into a discotheque. The other side of the story was the abusive way in which MEPA had granted the permit for the discotheque, as evidenced by the MEPA auditor’s report into the matter.
For Pullicino Orlando, a young MP who etched his name as some sort of rebellious backbencher committed to the environment, and ultimately touted for the post of environment minister, that fact alone should have signalled his retirement from the electoral race.
What everyone knew, at that early stage before the 8 March election, was that Pullicino Orlando had signed a contract with the owner of a discotheque to rent out the land at Mistra – an area outside the development zone – for the exclusive development of an open-air disco, from which he was to reap a lucrative €1.9 million over 15 years. Other allegations of influence, which he used to secure a favourable consideration of the disco permit, are the ongoing subject of a criminal case.
Instead of bowing out, Pullicino hung on, fully backed by the Nationalist party. He denied every single connection to the project, he launched himself into a shameful display at the Broadcasting Authority press conference with Alfred Sant, and he cried in Mosta.
And then he was resoundingly re-elected from both his constituencies. In a European country, we would surmise, this would have never happened. But in Malta, this sort of outcome is the least we can expect from the political values we celebrate.
The entire farce was later crowned by secretary-general Joe Saliba’s frank admission that he would pursue the same strategy had he found himself in a similar situation once again.
So it was the political class which, at the end of the day, won this election. Once again, it pursued power unashamedly, leaving a good part of the electorate bewildered at how a politician like Pullicino Orlando managed to hold on to his seat.
MaltaToday has never shied away from calling a spade a spade, and on 19 March, barely two weeks after the election, called for Pullicino Orlando’s resignation.
Looking back however, it is clear that while the disgraced Zebbug MP may have taken many people for a ride – perhaps not with his feigned environmental credentials, but with his brazen-faced denial in the face of the evidence mounting against him – so did the Nationalist Party, which supported JPO right to the end even though it was well aware of the facts of the case.
Today we can only conclude that Lawrence Gonzi knew all along that the MP indeed knew of the project when he denied any knowledge of it, and that he chose to field the MP for the elections and weather the storm as best as he could.
The fact is that this is how politics works in Malta.
But that does not stop us from denouncing the lack of values it has come to represent. When ethical behaviour gets thrown out of the window, and politicians can hold on to their seats and posts without even a modicum of humility in the face of damning evidence, then perhaps we ought to consider that we really get the political class we deserve.
This week, Harold Pinter passed away. But the playwright left us with a timely passage from his 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which truly captures the spirit of the political class that we, the electorate, often seem to exalt for its brutish grip on power.
“…the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.”

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