The ongoing campaign for the European Parliament elections has thrown into sharp focus a disconcerting feature of local politics.
While not offering anything substantial, either ideologically or materially, the two main political parties have once again descended into a spiral of negative campaigning aimed at consolidating their own respective positions within the European Parliament.
This year’s campaign makes it hard for voters to reconcile the national effort required to guarantee a good team of Maltese MEPs, working in the national interest, with the negative campaigning taking place on both sides. Rather than sending to Brussels a group of five, maybe six MEPs ready to work together to achieve the best possible deal for Malta, we have come to the culmination of our first five-year European legislature to see nothing more edifying than two unimaginative parties trading barbs over each other’s voting patterns.
Indeed, despite being removed from the provincialism of island politics for the duration of their lucrative stint in Brussels and Strasbourg, our five MEPs seem to have used their international platform to reinforce their party’s hold on power in Malta: rarely going beyond the pale of local politics to achieve more for the country.
All in all, it is a sad indictment of the way we do politics in Malta.
As expected, immigration has emerged as the main issue of concern to voters in this campaign; and yet the political rhetoric employed in this campaign does not bode at all well for the immediate future.
Joseph Muscat, a former MEP who has had his taste of European politics, seems a shadow of his former ‘progressive’ self when it comes to debating this issue. His discourse, especially at the mass rally at Ta’ Qali last Sunday, has been anything but progressive. Indeed, the Labour leader has bordered dangerously on the xenophobic, at times creating an utterly unnecessary sense of national animosity between Maltese and foreign workers. It is a rhetoric that does not befit Labour’s European (or for that matter, socialist) aspirations.
Equally, the Nationalists appear to have descended to a new nadir of mediocrity, with their schoolyard jeers at MEPs who fail to "press the right buttons”, or their attempt at likening Labour’s current MEP candidates to past leaders of the Labour Party: an indication, perhaps, that the PN has run out of genuine criticism of their current rivals, and can only resort to issues which are now over 30 years old.
Once again, we also saw the abortion card being played by the Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi: a man who seems to have made it his mission in life to turn foetuses into political footballs, despite the fact that all Malta’s mainstream parties agree that abortion should remain illegal.
As always, real issues are either sidelined completely or distorted beyond recognition, in a contest where scaremongering and fear tactics appear to be the only rules of the game. The electorate surely deserves better.
Rather than being motivated by the usual domestic concerns of a national election – when the government itself is at stake – European elections provide voters with a rare opportunity to impact the composition of a legislative assembly which may be described as the second most influential in the world.
In this context, voters would do well to question prospective candidates on what they can truly achieve for Malta (as opposed for their own parties) at European level. The PN, for instance, has built its campaign on job creation. But how do the PN candidates intend to create local jobs from their positions in the European parliament?
Similarly, voters might wish to ask Labour candidates what they intend to do to bring energy prices down, since their party has been campaigning on this purely domestic matter as part of its MEP campaign.
And all candidates can be quizzed on matters that directly relate to European law, such as the future of spring hunting. What they are pledging to do in the European Parliament about such a contentious matter? With the exception of parties like AD, whose position is clear, the answer to date has a been a cacophonic mess, with both Labour and PN engaged in ‘secret meetings’ with the hunters, while accusing their counterparts of making promises they know they can’t keep.
This newspaper believes that whatever the intention of an individual voter – be it to vote or abstain, both being entirely legitimate options – the electorate is entitled to be well-informed of candidates’ and parties’ promises and pledges before making up their minds. The democratic process is not about letting the parties invade our mental space with negative campaigning or hollow pledges – it is about questioning politicians and keeping them accountable to their own promises.
Sadly, though, it seems we have once again passed up an opportunity to overcome petty, tribal politics in favour of a campaign which focuses on real issues and ideas for a change. The upshot? We are likely to learn far more about voter preference in Malta from the abstention rate on June 6, than from the actual result two days later.
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