NEWS | Wednesday, 01 April 2009

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Disillusioned Labourites, independent trade unionists, believers in unfettered markets, moral conservatives and cosmopolitan liberals... JAMES DEBONO on the nebulous coalition which gave Eddie Fenech Adami the cutting edge over Labour to win five elections.

As soon as he was elected leader, Fenech Adami immediately moved to redefine the ideological boundaries of the Nationalist Party.
“I cannot but think of the workers and I tell them that our heart is with you. We don’t use you for our ends but we work for you. For us your interests come first and foremost,” declared Eddie Fenech Adami in his first speech after his investiture as party leader in 1977.
Under Fenech Adami, the welfare state, income tax and the State’s role to redistribute wealth from the haves to the have-nots became part of the PN’s ethos.
It was a radical departure from the party which under George Borg Olivier proposed the abolition of income tax in 1971 and the abolition of National Insurance – nicknamed the “bolla balla”– in 1976.
Ironically while Fenech Adami was broadening his party’s appeal Mintoff was preaching that “everyone who is not with us is against us”: widening the gulf separating the MLP from those sectors of society alienated by his warlike rhetoric.
Just a year before Fenech Adami’s investiture, Mintoff underlined the exclusive working class identity of his party. “In every place he visits Borg Olivier says: we are everybody’s party and when we will be in government we will be everybody’s government. And I tell him that we are not everybody’s party and we are not everybody’s government. We are not a government of thieves, whoever steals votes against us… We are a working class government.”
By narrowing the appeal of his party, Mintoff gave the PN the chance to transform itself into a populist movement representing a coalition of different and contrasting interests. But it required someone with the stature of Fenech Adami to keep this potentially explosive coalition united.

A clash between two patriarchs
It took a decade for the PN to recover from two consecutive defeats in 1971 and 1976, giving Mintoff enough time to change the face of the country by giving it a much needed dose of modernisation and secularisation: introducing civil marriages, decriminalising homosexuality and strengthening the welfare state. Unfortunately, Mintoff’s medicine was contaminated by a lethal cocktail of cronyism, violence and big daddy politics which alienated a number of left leaning intellectuals and trade unionists like former GWU secretary general Joe Attard Kingswell and economist Lino Briguglio.
Anthropologist Jeremy Boissevain notes that Mintoff behaved “like the traditional Maltese father – aloof, mainly harsh and looked after his own. The authoritarian figure was familiar to all Maltese. Most of them had grown up in and formed part of families dominated by such fathers.”
Like Mintoff, Eddie Fenech Adami grew in stature as a national patriarch who compensated Mintoff’s Mediterranean machismo, which he lacked, with the more re-assuring and homely posture of a family man. It was an image which was ultimately more consonant with the mood of a post-scarcity society fed up with the autarky and frugality practiced by Mintoff.
Malta was presented a choice between a virile caudillo who challenged the status quo with the latent threat of violence, and a conservative pater-familias who promised stability and respect for the rule of law.
In fact it was Mintoffian thuggery which on Monday October 15, 1979 gave Fenech Adami his baptism of fire. After ransacking and setting fire to the offices and printing rooms of Progress Press on the pretext of an unfounded assassination attempt on Mintoff’s life, Labour Party supporters invaded the private residence of Eddie Fenech Adami in B’Kara, ransacking his home and assaulting his wife, Mary, his five children and his elderly mother. In both incidents the police failed to intervene. From then on Fenech Adami was portrayed by his party as a latter-day Moses able to deliver the people from misrule to a promised land where political and economic freedoms co-existed with a firmly ingrained welfare state.
It was the beginning of a brand new era as the Nationalist party moved to the centre left while the MLP became increasingly authoritarian.
The shift to the left
In its 1981 electoral programme the PN accused Mintoff of “practicing state capitalism” through which “workers were simply exploited by the state”. Also in its 1981 electoral programme the PN disputed the socialist credentials of the MLP by attacking Mintoff for behaving like a capitalist.
“The Mintoff Government tends to run the country very much in the manner of a private capitalist, managing his own privately owned property, and seeking to maximize his own profit and not that of the country’s citizens”.
Under the influence of its leftist ideologue; Rev. Peter Serracino Inglott, the party became a strong advocate of workers’ participation, to the extent that in 1981 the party committed itself to actively promote “the development of workers’ participation in both the running of, and in the sharing of profits made by, the enterprises they work in.”
But while defending the working class, the PN consistently denied the Marxist notion of class struggle and claimed that it was a popular party representing all strata of society.
The party even exhibited a utopian streak exhibited by making grand proposals like the promise to give every citizen the right to choose a private doctor of his or her choice at the state’s expense; a measure which was never implemented.
In some ways Fenech Adami was a forerunner of “third way politics” which embraced aspects of social democracy while retaining a belief in capitalism’s ability to generate wealth and prosperity.

From redemption to compromise
The PN also presented itself as the party for national reconciliation amidst acts political thuggery which escalated after the contested 1981 election result in which the PN lacked a majority of seats despite winning a majority of votes.
While resisting the temptation of violence, Fenech Adami was skillful in testing the limits of the state’s repressive apparatus by marching in to Zejtun, deemed a no-go by Labour thugs as well as criminal elements in the police force in 1986.
The murder of Raymond Caruana in 1986 was a defining moment in Fenech Adami ascent to power. As parliament was about to discuss the budget, Eddie Fenech Adami stood up addressing the Speaker saying ‘this is irrelevant. What we should be talking about is bringing democracy to this country?”
Still in his typical role as the man of compromises, when elected to power Fenech Adami did not persist in seeking justice against all the culprits who violated human rights or engaged in gross acts of corruption in the 1980s.
Joe Psaila, the perpetrator of so many abuses under a Labour government, was promoted under Fenech Adami to Assistant Commissioner. Corruption charges against the notorious former Public Works minister Lorry Sant were dropped because of prescription, and he was even granted a Presidential pardon for his role in acts of violence following the 1987 election.
The only person to pay a significant price for crimes committed in the 1980s was former Police Commissioner Laurence Pullicino, who was imprisoned for his part in the death of Nardu Debono in police custody.
As an expert in art of compromise, Fenech Adami was able to manage the formidable but disparate coalition he had assembled; through which the PN was to consolidate its hold on Maltese society for the next twenty years.
Since the Nationalist administrations were capable of pleasing business interests and at the same time improving the standard of living of workers, the coalition remained intact.
Fenech Adami ignored Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici’s constant complaints on the increasing national debt by spending lavishly on much needed infrastructural projects, on keeping thousand of workers illegally hired by Labour on the eve of the 1987 election in employment and extending the welfare state by giving stipends to university students, who multiplied from 800 to 8,000 under his rule.
Although a staunch moral conservative who resisted any attempts to introduce civil liberties like divorce, he was anything but a fiscal conservative or a believer in balanced budgets.
Still he managed to increase government spending without behaving like a traditional “tax and spend liberal.” For he also managed to decrease the highest income tax band from 60% to 35%; and collecting more money in the process. He was able to do so by high rates of economic growth registered between 1987 and the mid 1990s when the economic engine started to slow down.

Welcome back Cadbury
While appropriating the notion of social justice from the left, Fenech Adami also popularised a political discourse typical of Thatcherism based on freedom of choice in health, education and consumer goods.
Under Labour workers moved up the rungs of the middle class and had more money to spend, but they could only find Desserta chocolate bars and Chinese luncheon meat on the grocery shelves as a result of Mintoff’s import controls and bulk buying system.
All this was to change after 1987, when Cadbury and Mars made a comeback.
A billboard with a shopping trolley full of consumer goods with the slogan “l-ghazla f’idejk” (the choice is yours) symbolised the PN’s 1992 electoral campaign. In so doing he increased the party’s majority from a paltry 4,000 votes in 1987 to 12,000 in 1992.
Rampant consumerism and the PN’s lassez faire attitude led to a construction frenzy which scarred the Maltese environment and townscape. Despite the setting up of a Planning Authority, it was powerless when faced with applications for big mega project. It was a time when large stretches of the Maltese coast was given at a pittance to hoteliers to develop.
But unlike Margaret Thatcher who privatized basic utilities like water and electricity Fenech Adami was very cautious in shedding the state’s role in the economy.
In this task even showed less enthusiasm than his successor Lawrence Gonzi. While Malta only gained €318 million between 1992 and 2003 under Eddie Fenech Adami’s stewardship, a staggering €697 million was gained under a Gonzi administration pressed into reducing the economy’s deficit, to match Maastricht criteria for the adoption of the European currency. The only major privatisation under Fenech Adami’s rule was the wholesome sale of Mid Med Bank to HSBC. Yet by the end of his reign, the state still controlled a shipping company, a bank, a telecommunications company, the dockyards as well as the energy sector.
Fenech Adami even managed to co-exist for an entire decade with militant trade unionist Sammy Meilaq running the show at the Dockyards. This shows Fenech Adami’s reluctance to force a showdown, as Thatcher did when she sent the army to violently subdue the miners’ strike in 1984.
Instead of wholesome privatizations, successive Nationalist governments under Fenech Adami excelled in creating a ‘netherworld’ between the public and private sector in which the state held a central role in dispensing tenders or direct orders for services previously carried out by government employees. Under the pretext of efficiency the state retained its traditional role as a dispenser of political patronage.

The phoenix from the ashes
It was the need to align Malta’s fiscal system with that of the European Union, which finally weakened Fenech Adami’s ability to keep his coalition united.
By the mid 1990s Fenech Adami’s coalition fell apart as small businesses represented by the GRTU-led by its Director General Vince Farrugia- rose up in rebellion against the introduction of Value Added Tax.
Faced by the desertion of thousands of self employed and other disaffected lobbies like hunters, the party faced the challenge posed by the pragmatic Alfred Sant by resting on the laurels of the massive transformation accomplished since 1987.
Yet the PN also paid a price for showing traces of arrogance and detachment from everyday life. On the eve of the 1996 election Fenech Adami committed one of his greatest gaffes; replying to Simone Cini’s questions by lamenting that people were only complaining because they were not satisfied with having just one air-conditioner.
It was a prelude to a second gaffe when in a rare moment of weakness, he described the outcome of an election lost by 8,000 votes as a “photo finish,” which exposed a sense of incredulity when faced by certain defeat in what was seen as a sign that the patriarch was nearing the autumn of his political life.
But defeat in 1996 turned out to be a momentary setback –a single electoral defeat in six elections for Fenech Adami, and an ephemeral victory for Alfred Sant who went on to lose three consecutive elections.
Thanks to the mutiny of his old adversary Dom Mintoff against Alfred Sant, Fenech Adami made a remarkable comeback to be able to re-invent himself first as a leader with a “social conscience” in the 1998 election and then as leader of a “national movement” for membership in the European Union in 2003, whose final victory earned him a place in the Nationalist pantheon of heroes as “Missier Malta Ewropea”.
In the eyes of many middle of the road voters, all the mistakes and cronyism committed by Eddie Fenech Adami’s third government between 1998 and 2003, were redeemed by the party’s pro EU stance.
It was the promise of EU membership and Labour’s hazy partnership alternative that kept an increasingly disparate coalition of social liberals and conservatives, trade unionists and business bodies, environmentalists and hoteliers; all united under the “Yes” banner.
Yet everyone knew that his place in this coalition of sorts was behind and not beside Eddie Fenech Adami. When Alternattiva Demokratika tried to turn the pro EU alliance in to a formal political coalition between two parties it was unceremoniously dumped by Fenech Adami himself on the eve of the 2003 election.
Yet even after seeing Malta anchored in the EU in May 2004 and his dauphin Lawrence Gonzi office in Castille, Fenech Adami refused to call it a day, clinging to the ceremonial post of President of the Republic in an uneventful five years which may well have been the autumn of Malta’s last political patriarch. Yet the coalition he had arduously built in the 1980s outlived him and went to win again under completely different guise and leadership style in 2008.

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