David Friggieri | Sunday, 22 March 2009

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Rainbow politics

Over the past fifteen years, explaining the ins and outs of local politics to foreign friends was never a straightforward affair. You started off by warning them that Nationalist actually meant left-of-centre-Europhile while Labour was equivalent to right-of-centre-Europhobe. You went on to describe the impact of the Catholic Church, replying that, yes, unbelievably its influence is even stronger than in Lech Kaczyinski’s Poland. And you ended up pointing out that elections hinge on a few thousand votes whose swing one way or the other guarantees a nail-biting, hysterical finale.
Today things are a bit more complicated than that. We have woken up to behold a beautiful new dawn of Maltese politics in which those two banal, if misleading, primary colours have been replaced by two magnificent rainbows which look so similar that they might as well merge into one Technicolor spectacle.
Rainbow politics is one cheery way of describing the phenomenon – you can already see the metaphor catching on. Some commentators prefer to employ the term ‘broad church’ to describe the party they support.
More recently, in a flourish of [INSERT ONE OF THE FOLLOWING: shamelessness/honesty/naivety/opportunism], others still have simply dispensed with any pretence of ideological coherence, admitting that the choice between throwing in their lot with Rainbow Party 1 or Rainbow Party 2 boils down to cool pragmatism, nothing more, nothing less. The question being: which platform is likely to get me elected faster?
Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised that the two dominant forces which control Maltese society have gradually taken on this multi-faceted demeanour. When the holy grail of electoral success depends on a couple thousand votes, a party can hardly afford to alienate any particular sector of the population without seriously torpedoing its chances of pulling off that slim victory at the polls. The temptation for parties to put themselves across as being all things to all men becomes a matter of life and death.
Pragmatism? Realpolitik? Inevitable adjustment to the market? Perhaps it is. But we can’t avoid the fact that this state of affairs causes considerable confusion when it comes to the big political issues of our time. To be brutally honest, you don’t have to possess a degree in political science to conclude that we’re all over the place on every single hot topic up for discussion: the environment, divorce, the relationship between Church and State and, most recently, immigration.
The reason appears to be elusive but it is, in fact, fairly simple.
If the two political parties profess to welcome within their fold hardcore conservatives and liberals, the construction big guns and environmentalists, progressives and theodems, Mintuffjani and Europhiles, Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf, where does that leave them on the important issues? On the issues, in other words, that politics is actually meant to be about in the first place.
Personally, I think it leaves us – and them – in an unsatisfying no-man’s land of some talk and very little meaningful action in which the real winners are threefold: 1) the status quo, 2) the loyalists within each party and their hangers-on and 3) intellectual dishonesty.
I am not blind to the fact that there is a certain genius in the way the whole system functions. For if the two main parties welcome within their ranks a fair share of theodems and progressives and flirt with construction magnates while having candidates on their ticket who have turned so green that they may quite possibly live in a Scandinavian tree-house, the system is ideally primed to converge somewhere in the middle. Possibly, the biggest virtue of this state of affairs is the avoidance of any real conflict or traumatic upheaval within society. It is, to an extent, the perfect recipe for stability which, you’ve got to concede, is not such a bad thing when things are looking rocky on the world stage.
But (there often is a but, you see!), in this scenario you can’t avoid asking yourself the big question. Can the political parties really justify their existence as anything other than a solid platform from which individuals decide to launch their political careers?
Alternatively, you may wonder whether we have reached a stage where political choice is simply based on an evaluation as to who would make the best manager of a small island economy. In which case, why don’t we just let the experts get on with the job?
In the meantime, the rest of us will keep ourselves entertained trying to guess whether Joe is really more progressive than Lawrence or whether Lawrence is actually greener than Joe. And we’ll gasp in mock amazement and indignation when a Nadur reveller who decides to impersonate Jesus finds himself in court. Serves us right? Probably.

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