Let’s face it: it was never going to be a clean electoral campaign. True, the next election will not be defined by any visceral clash of ideologies, still less overshadowed by all-encompassing issues such as Independence, EU membership, etc. But this is unlikely to dampen our national appetite for political animosity. Far from it.
It seems that with Elections ’08 (or is that 07?) we are dealing with an ill-disguised scramble for The Thing Itself – raw, unadulterated power. So it’s back to political basics: the two-tribe, us-against-them mentality, desperately trying to reassert itself in the face of open mutiny.
From this perspective, anyone still expecting a champagne-and-roses campaign seriously ought to have his head examined; but naturally, only after taking of his wig.
It seems that the Nationalist Party has a slight problem with its in-house strategy unit. Slow to respond, slow to react – not just to the Opposition, but even to international criticism, as in the case of the tuna pen incident last May – the once vibrant Stamperija propaganda machine appears to have finally ground to a halt under the sluggish August sun.
Labour, by way of contrast, appears to have gone into overdrive trying to project itself as a party of achievers. It has occasionally slipped up in the process – look under Jason Micallef for further details – but few would level the charge of lethargy at a party which seems incapable of just shutting up and letting us all enjoy what little is left of summer.
No, indeed. Labour has IDEAS, and wants to share them all with us. Admittedly, most of these ideas are simply reincarnations of past consultation documents, all hammered together in one voluminous publication called “Pjan Ghal Bidu Gdid”… but no matter. Regardless of what you make of the ideas themselves, Labour’s sudden spurt of energy has clearly caught the Nationalists wrong-footed.
For one thing, many of Alfred Sant’s recent proposals are aimed at winning over the growing army of disgruntled pale blue voters. As such, any attempt to shoot them out of the water will only exacerbate the PN’s existing problems with its own grassroots.
The logical counter-strategy would be to come up with its own set of ideas and proposals, rooted in what is fast emerging as the underpinning theme for the coming election: the need for change. But then again, how can this possibly be accomplished, under a leadership which was conceived and engineered precisely for the purpose of maintaining the post-Fenech Adami status quo?
This leaves the Nationalist Party strategists – at least, the ones who aren’t busy cruising the Med – with only one workable strategy at their disposal: all-out, ad hominem character assassination.

Caught napping
The past two weeks threw up two priceless examples of how this works in practice. The first was the surprising news that a future Labour government would consider elevating the president of the Malta Council for Economic and Social Development (MCESD) to the rank of Cabinet minister.
As with all Sant’s recent proposals, this one never quite made it into the party’s “Bidu Gdid” publication… leaving one to suspect that the Labour leader simply makes these things up as he goes along, leaving an army of party apparatchiks to desperately make sense of them before confronting the media.
But it certainly excited interest among the business community, which evidently interpreted the move as a long-overdue acknowledgement that something really is rotten in the state of public governance. Sant appears to be contemplating widening the definition of “minister” to also include unelected technocrats: a policy which has its detractors, but which many – including, it seems, AD’s finance spokesman Edward Fenech – deem worthy of serious consideration.
Whatever you make of the proposal, Alfred Sant has once again placed onto the national agenda the issue of State-social partners relations… thereby also reminding us of one of Gonzi’s earliest failures, the stillborn social pact.
On a political level the move seems to have also pre-emptively limited the Nationalist Party’s options. The PN could (and did) argue that the Constitution specifies that ministers ought to be elected by the people for reasons of accountability. But who can possibly take this seriously, after a litany of scandals corruption cases which have illustrated precisely the extent of ministerial unaccountability?
Besides, in so doing, the party in government was also forced to concede that it had already created its own little exception to this rule: in this case, to accommodate the Permanent Representative to Brussels and former Prime Minister’s personal assistant, Richard Cachia Caruana.
As things stand, the best the PN could come up with was the somewhat lame rejoinder that the MCESD president is already present at Cabinet on a certain committee. Ah, but that is not exactly the rank of a minister, now is it?
The second was a proposal, made last week in yet another off-the-cuff remark, to provide financial assistance to first-time buyers to the tune of Lm50,000.
Here, the PN’s disarray is altogether more visible, for the simple reason that unlike the MCESD proposal, this one can easily be countered on economic grounds; namely, that it would distort an already grossly distorted property market, and quite possibly prove to be the final pinprick that bursts the great property bubble.
The argument goes like this: if you subsidise the very segment which can’t afford to pay high prices, you will effectively remove the market’s only impetus to bring those prices down to within their reach. As a result, the most likely outcome is that property prices will simply continue to rise inexorably, until neither government nor banks can afford to carry the can. All things told, a fine recipe for a home-grown property crash.
This is basic economics, and it is inconceivable that a Harvard-trained economist would not understand it. Until, of course, you factor politics into the equation; and suddenly, an economically unsound proposal becomes not only intensely understandable, but little short of a propaganda coup.
There are a number of reasons why the PN can’t really argue against this proposal. By shooting it down, it would project the image that it doesn’t care about the financial problems of young couples. The present Housing Authority has already piloted a number of similar schemes over the years, and you know what they say about “people in glass Housing Authorities”. More to the point, Lawrence Gonzi, as Finance Minister, is most likely planning to do something similar, if not identical, in the forthcoming budget.
This is, in fact, the oldest strategy in Dr Sant’s box of Harvard tricks, and incredibly it seems to work every single time. Pre-emption is better than war.

Old tricks
Faced with all this, it is hardly surprising that the PN would fight back using the only weapon left in its arsenal. General Secretary Joe Saliba first indicated the direction he expected the campaign to take, when he made a calculated reference to the MLP as a “party of face-lifts”… just days after the Opposition leader underwent surgery to correct an eye condition.
Another discernible strategy is to play on the respective leaders’ ages. Alfred Sant, we are told, is approaching the venerable old age (!) of 60. He has been Labour leader since 1992: that’s 14 long years. Gonzi, by way of contrast, has only been around since 2004. Who, then, is the freshest flower in the bouquet?
All very interesting, until you realise that Gonzi’s biggest electoral drawback is precisely his apparent inability to inject any fresh, new ideas to his party’s DNA – or even to remove any of the wizened faces from his Cabinet, despite a series of national outcries over ministerial uselessness.
Admittedly, Sant remains very much the unpredictable maverick we all remember from 1998… but then again, is ageism the best we can expect from the PN strategy group these days?
Of course not. There’s also the grand tour-de-force, the apex of modern political strategic thinking: i.e., to pick on the most glaring of the labour Leader’s physical defects, his great unmentionable “parrokka”.
What would happen if Labour were to adopt the same tactics? I shudder to think. After all, there is no shortage of ugliness and glaring physical defects on the benches across the Parliament aisle. No names mentioned, but one rather prominent government figure has a face which looks like it might have got in the way of a meteorite shower in another geological age. Can you imagine if those craters became the focus of a Labour billboard? Goodness. I suspect the howls of Nationalist indignation would be audible all the way from Brussels.
But then, it’s perfectly OK to refer to the Labour leader’s wig – which I am told also covers some kind of dermatological disfigurement – because… um… he’s Labour.
My, what a fine political debate we all have in store.