Evarist Bartolo | Sunday, 26 April 2009

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Using Eddie to get out the vote

The PN is doing all it can with a lot of help from its friends in the media to deify the figure of Dr Eddie Fenech Adami and mobilise its voters for the elections for the European Parliament in June. The majority of voters did not believe the PN’s electoral promises and voted for the Partit Laburista and the other parties. The PN remained in power thanks to the thousands of voters it brought in from overseas who do not feel the pain caused by the PN policies.
Since the 2008 election, things have got worse for most of the people. The number of children, families and pensioners living in poverty has increased. Working and middle-class families are finding it harder to make ends meet. More persons feel their jobs are under threat. More persons have to accept working conditions that are turning them into modern slaves. Taxes and prices of public utilities have gone up, hurting thousands of families and pensioners and making it more difficult for businesses to operate in a viable and sustainable way.
The indications are that thousands of PN voters will stay away from the June elections. This already happened five years ago when the PN lost the European parliament elections. In just over a year after the 2003 general election, 50,000 voters abandoned the PN. The PN set up a commission to analyse its heavy electoral defeat and concluded that the main reason for the electoral defeat was the loss of credibility of the PN because “of the many promises of government, of the party and the candidates, that were never delivered, and that should not have been promised in the first place as they could not be delivered.”
The Commission also said the PN lost 50,000 votes because “the party is perceived as serving the interests of just a few.” “Some even considered the appointment of Dr Fenech Adami as President as another example that those in power take care of themselves.” Fearing a repeat, the PN is now trying to rally its supporters by trying to reignite their memories by replaying Fenech Adami’s role in the 1980s as a leader of the Opposition. The contradiction is that the PN want to project him as a national healer and great reconciler and at the same time glorifying those political actions where Fenech Adami is still perceived as a divisive figure that attract more partisan loyalty than national respect.
His rhetoric was all about national reconciliation and fighting corruption and providing government that “rejects and steers clear of political division and partisan differences, but also that it promotes an ever more inclusive society” inspired by “the ideal of true democracy, where equality of all citizens means that none fall by the wayside in the march towards progress; indeed the ideal of truly Christian, brotherly democracy, where all actively participate in the life of the country and play their part in solidarity with everyone else.”
And yet, after leaving office as a prime minister five years ago he left a political heritage of a system of government with a corrosive culture of cronyism, with a winner-takes-all mentality, which uses the stranglehold it has on the levers of patronage, and most of the local media to run the country like a one-party state with the semblance of a multi-party parliamentary democracy.
The PN is still being run on the tracks laid down by Fenech Adami. The country is still run by a government of the PN, by the PN and for the PN. When Fenech Adami was re-elected prime minister in 2003 he promised the dawn of a new spring to “…change all we have allowed to deteriorate, stagnate or to go wrong through lethargy, carelessness or lack of thought.” Governance has not improved with Prime Minister Gonzi. An increasing number of people see their own social and economic conditions worsen and that of the ministers and their friends improve. Many people feel the pain of paying high taxes for low-standard public services due to an inefficient and unaccountable government.
The PN are hoping that Fenech Adami can still work wonders for them, but will he? His single-mindedness to grab every vote made him promise everything to everyone including hunters and bird trappers, dockyard workers, farmers and thousands of workers and employees who have either lost their jobs or experienced a drop in their working conditions thanks to his neoliberal policies dressed up in Christian Democratic rhetoric. As the PN tries to deify Fenech Adami it obviously does not want to remind people of his extravagant and unfulfilled promises. Fenech Adami himself probably tries to forget them. Perhaps Charles de Gaulle was right when he said: “Since a politician never believes what he says, he is quite surprised when he is taken at his word!”

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