Gonzi struggled to project an image of calm and serenity yesterday, but was unable to conceal his bitterness at Labour’s ‘populist’ campaign. RAPHAEL VASSALLO on the chronicle of a defeat foretold
The atmosphere at the PN headquarters in Pietà yesterday was vaguely reminiscent of a funeral parlour. Behind the smiles and impeccable politeness, there was also a palpable aura of despondency. At one point – while accusing his opposite number of hijacking a Europe campaign with purely local issues – the Prime Minister even allowed his sentence to trail away into a sigh and a shake of his head.
Everything about Lawrence Gonzi’s delivery yesterday spelt out a single message in large, indelible letters. “Yes, we will lose Saturday’s election,” he seemed to be saying, “But, damn it, we don’t deserve to...”
That is of course debatable, but at the same time few would deny that the writing on the wall is clear. All independent surveys strongly suggest a Labour landslide on Saturday – differing only in the margin of victory – though confronted with these and other prognostics, Gonzi put on a brave but ultimately unconvincing face.
“You all know I refuse to discuss surveys and polls,” he decreed impatiently when asked about a projected 10% advantage for Labour. “I prefer to wait until I have the official results in hand...”
All the same, his own party appears to have already thrown in the towel behind his back. In what may well be a first for Maltese politics – or indeed, politics anywhere – the PN’s own campaign ads now predict a worst-case scenario, whereby the Nationalists retain only one seat to Labour’s four. And Gonzi himself recently made an astonishing public admission, when he strongly hinted to an audience of disgruntled hunters that – if they were “not careful” – the sixth seat might go to AD’s Arnold Cassola.
“Yes, we have had to make difficult decisions,” Gonzi conceded yesterday with an air of exasperation. “But these were necessary for the national interest...”
It was a leitmotif to which he would return with every example of populism and opportunism with which the Labour party succeeded in derailing the entire campaign – the real theme of yesterday’s press conference, in which nothing was said that wasn’t already widely known and discussed beforehand.
“This is the fundamental difference between our campaign and that of Labour,” the Prime Minister began. “The PL has chosen to disregard the European Union altogether, and instead speaks only of national matters. It has taken the easy way out, appealing to populist issues to increase its own popularity, while ignoring the realities our country is facing...”
In defending his record, Gonzi urged the electorate to remember the backdrop against which so many unpopular decisions had to be taken: foremost of which, the global economic crisis.
“Much larger countries than Malta have faced much larger problems. Some, like Spain, have seen their unemployment soar to as much as 17%. In Malta, by way of contrast, unemployment stands at only 6%. This is still a cause for concern for us: when even a single person registers for work and doesn’t find any, that is a problem we have to face....”
But the Labour Party, he said, has chosen to ignore all this, and has instead embraced populist rhetoric aimed only at boosting its short-term electoral chances.
In between staple PN soundbites – anything from “we are not afraid of the challenges ahead” to “we want to bring the European Union to a factory shopfloor near you“ – Gonzi was scarcely able to conceal his bitterness when accusing his opposite number of opportunism.
This he did on four separate issues: the revision of water and electricity tariffs; unemployment; public transport reform; and last but not least, irregular immigration.
And yet, little of this has any direct bearing on Saturday’s election. It is as though Gonzi has been forced to play along to a tune set for him by Joseph Muscat; and it is evidently not a position the Prime Minister relishes.
But apart from the occasional admission that the government, with hindsight, could have handled some of those issues slightly better, Gonzi was on the whole defensive. As such, there were moments when he could no longer conceal the enormous contradictions in his own arguments. For instance, questioned about the controversial Delimara power station contract – signed in the absence of an Environment Impact Assessment – Gonzi insisted this was the only way the matter could have been concluded.
“It is only natural that an EIA would be carried out after the choice of technology was made,” he quickly retorted. But this was at best a distortion of what actually happened: for the EIA was commissioned, not after the “technology was chosen”, but after the contract itself was already signed on the dotted line.
Besides, minutes before his defence of the controversial contract, Gonzi had lambasted Joseph Muscat for omitting any reference to the international price of oil in connection with the hike in utility tariffs.
Ah, but what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If our dependence on oil resulted in higher water and electricity tariffs... what sense did it make to choose none other than heavy fuel oil for the new power station? Doesn’t this make us all the more dependent on notoriously unstable international oil prices?
Elsewhere, the Prime Minister failed to convince when asked for reassurances that this sensitive decision had indeed been taken by the Cabinet of Ministers... as opposed to by the Nationalist Party itself, as strongly suggested by Austin Gatt last Saturday.
“I can assure you all,” Gonzi insisted, “that when Gatt referred to ‘the party’, he meant ‘the party in government’...”
But did he really? If so, why did he choose to couch his already peculiar statement in the words ‘party first of all’? Surely a seasoned Cabinet minister would know the difference between party and State, and avoid such an obvious electoral pitfall in the last lap before E-day itself...
On other issues, however, it must be said that Gonzi fared better in his own defence. And nowhere was he more convincing – as usual – than on the issue where he is unfairly criticised the most: irregular immigration.
Joseph Muscat, Gonzi declared, had committed the unpardonable sin of turning a human tragedy into a political football.
“Why?” he rhetorically asked, with reference to Muscat’s recent insistence on an “extraordinary” debate in parliament. “Because a boat turned up with 230 people on board? Is that an emergency? If so, why wasn’t it an emergency when so many other boats had come before? I told the Opposition leader back then: yes, let’s have a debate by all means. Let’s discuss the issue, but with the seriousness it deserves...”
Far from an emergency, the Prime Minister insisted, Muscat views the entire issue as nothing more than an opportunity for his own self-advancement.
And this alone explains his bitterness. For though Gonzi knows he is “ethically, morally and legally” right in his convictions, he knows equally well that the general public is far more attuned to Muscat’s scaremongering talk of “crisis”, than to his own impassioned appeals for rationality and calm.
“I have only one thing to say about people who adopt opportunistic, populist policies,” he said almost as an afterthought. “Their place is not in politics. In politics, you cannot allow yourself to be dragged away by the current...”
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