At the launch of Azzjoni Nazzjonali last June, its chairman Josie Muscat loudly proclaimed the death of ideology to the assembled all-male posse.
“Neither left nor right,” he declared when asked to plot his party’s position on the global political map. “Ideologies are a thing of the past. We’ll be realistic.”
The irony is as poignant as it is apparent. AN – which champions Christian family values, opposes divorce and gay marriages, and is a stern critic of multiculturalism – is arguably the only local political movement to which the term “ideology” still applies.
And yet, while plainly false, Josie Muscat’s affirmation is nonetheless mostly true. Close an eye at the fringe movements tucked away in online chat forums, and all that remains is a collusion of mainstream political parties which are indistinguishable in their every policy. People born in the late 1980s, who will be voting for the first time this year, have every reason not to even to understand the meaning of the word “ideology”: a strange legacy for a political landscape in which, until 1987, the political frontier between Left and Right was as visible as the Great Wall of China.
In some respects, the collapse of this demarcation line was an inevitable consequence of forces outside any local political party’s control: namely, Perestroika and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. This not only robbed the Socialist Old Guard of its entire economic platform: it also fomented a global free market culture which allowed even Communist China to get away with capitalism without anyone even batting an eyelid.
Inevitably, the old ideologues who strove against this wind of change were quickly overwhelmed. After a crushing defeat in 1992, MLP leader Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici was replaced at the helm by Dr Alfred Sant, with his PhD from Harvard and his newfound admiration for all things American.
Sant’s earliest decisions involved re-aligning Malta’s socialist party with the emerging “New Left” phenomenon, popularised by Bill Clinton in the US and later by Tony Blair in the UK. Suddenly, privatisation was no longer a Great Satan, and along with strict protectionist policies and black and white TV, the old 1970s gangsta’ culture of Il-Qattus, It-Toto and Il-Qahbu found itself left at the Macina while the rest of the party moved wholesale to Mile End.
Meanwhile, globalisation was tilting the balance firmly back in favour of private enterprise. By the late 1990s, the previously State controlled banking system had been all but completely privatised… although significantly, the PN failed to keep its promises to the dispossessed National Bank owners, choosing instead to sell its shares to the general public. And by failing to redress the injustice of the 1939 rent laws, the PN parted company with their ancestral allies, the wealthy bankers and landowners, and in so doing severed its last remaining ties with the old ideological Right.
Partly in preparation for the EU, partly as a pendulum-swing away from the 1970s, the political class was slowly dismantling the selfsame structures that had previously defined its own hegemony. With the old battlefield now redefined, and with so many of the previous ideological differences now invisible, it fell to the European Union to provide a “final frontier” upon which the two parties could once again diverge.
Apart from inducing electoral fatigue, the great EU debate – culminating in the now infamous 2003 referendum/election – blurred what little remained of the two main parties’ traditional differences. At a glance, both sides appeared curiously out of place in their respective positions: the Socialist party campaigning against EU accession in stark discord with its European equivalents; the traditionally conservative PN having to rely on the emerging liberal community for support, in an argument which pitted it against many of its counterparts in the EPP.
All who supported one side or the other for purely ideological reasons faced inevitable betrayal in the aftermath. Committed Eurosceptics who had lent the Labour Party their support were disaffected by the same party’s perceived “U-turn” soon after the election. And when Sant declared he would ratify the now-defunct Constitutional Treaty, the U-turn became an outright declaration of war.
The PN similarly fell foul of both environmentalists and the hunting lobby over a promised derogation from the Birds Directive; and once Lawrence Gonzi took over in 2004, his flirtation with radical evangelist groups and his dogged resistance to divorce alienated an increasingly liberal section of his own party’s support.
Briefly put, the battle for Europe left a trail of disillusioned citizens in its wake.
Not even the Green Party emerged unscathed from the political earthquake. Stepping in to fill the void created by the PN’s abandonment of the upper middle classes, Alternattiva Demokratika now rallies its supporters under the banner of rent reform. Significantly, its most recent splinter group, “Zminijietna: the Voice of the Left”, fell out with the mother party precisely over the same issue, which it feels should be postponed until after a glorious new, Hugo Chavez-inspired socialist revolution.
Unsurprisingly, then, Malta’s first election since EU accession will take place against the backdrop of a giant ideological vacuum. Nor is it particularly surprising that, as one party after another abandons its former principles to converge on an increasingly money-oriented political centre, the only ideologies left standing just happen to be the most extreme.

rvassallo@mediatoday.com.mt