The Ugly Dress Rehearsal

They’re electing representatives of the people in a number of councils tomorrow. From Zebbug (Gozo) to Sliema (Malta) the voters who will bother to take a stroll to the polling booth will be electing a group of people who are supposedly best placed to manage the needs of their locality. That is the principle behind the process of administrative devolution that began in 1993 with the setting up of the local council system.  It’s almost twenty years now and the Kunsilli are ingrained in our political system of representation – for good or for bad – and ever since Labour’s rethink about participation in local politics they have also been a microcosm of our wider political field.

Ever since the times of Cicero, electoral campaigns for the municipium  were a hotly contested affair. As the wikipedia article will tell you the ultimate right for a citizen is the right to vote (civitas optimo iure) – something to be treasured above all. Ugly electoral campaigns are also not something new and notions of slander, corruption and dirty politics on the eve of elections were not exactly invented by the PLPN crowd. Nothing new under the sun there. So what to expect from tomorrow’s vote?

Well, the result per se, should technically not have a meaning beyond enabling us to understand whether our cives have become more intelligent with the use of their ultimate power. At the end of the day the municipal council that is elected in each locality will have an effect on the lives of its citizens via the decisions it takes. It should be obvious to anyone who stops to think for a moment that the ultimate consideration therefore when casting one’s vote is the competence and potential of the candidate. To summarise it more succinctly: It is not WHO is behind the candidate but rather WHO HE IS and WHAT HE STANDS FOR. 

And that is where we start to get complicated. Down on the ground, where it counts, I have no reason to suspect that every candidate contesting the elections and committing his or her time for a few years of civic duty has plans and ideas for the running of his locality. Even better I am sure that in the absolute majority of cases the interest is borne by a love of the locality and a desire to improve it or bring out the best in it. That is after all what the council election is about. All this happens behind the elaborate facade that is the involvement of the major political parties and it is not helped by the fact that this set of elections is the last official public scrutiny before the next general elections.

So we get the ugly dress rehearsal. Once again signs will be read where there are none. For the umpteenth time Labour will make a song and dance about winning local elections when in opposition. It’s not like we have not already been there. It is an exercise in collective dis-education.  Why? Because your criteria when voting for local representatives should be the competence of the candidates and not whether you are exercising your vote to send a message to the Prime Minister. If you are stupid enough to waste the great prerogative that you have to choose the best local representatives because you’d rather be sending some message to the PN government then your idea of how democracy works is seriously flawed.

Labour could not help itself though. Thanks to Franco Debono’s antics it was duped into campaign mode at what turns out to be a very early stage and is now desperately trying to keep the election mode going as much as possible. That is why although we are speaking about local councils and performance the national media is full of arrows and stabs aimed at the heart of “GonziPN”. And then there was the whole RecordingsGate. First Joanna Gonzi then Julian Galea then Gonzi again were caught on tape – unsurprisingly all the candidates were from Cyrus Engerer’s Sliema council. The public heard PN candidates utter the obvious – our inbred tribal hatred was suddenly there for all to see. The PN countered with a few clips of its own – giving the usual suspects pride of place in its counter-information exercise.

The relevance this had for Local Council politics was that it reinforced the idea that PLPN still do not bother to screen candidates to check their suitability for public office. Did we need the recordings to find that out? There is a paucity of political potential already as it is and the recordings only threw the truth into everybody’s face. From Mosta to Sliema the signs of an illness in our system were already evident. As for dress rehearsals for an election we saw the two behemoths unashamedly re-engage in slander and mud-slinging politics where content is relegated to the footnotes of a manifesto. There it was – a race to uncover the sleaziest candidate, long-forgotten criminal records unveiled and more. What should have been a legitimate exercise of democratic checks-and-balances became a witch-hunt.

Then came Muscat’s Iron Lady performance. As others have pointed out it was obvious were Muscat got his Assisian inspiration from. The Labour leader would have fared much better had he memorised another great line from the movie: It used to be about trying to do something, now it’s all about trying to be someone. And that really hits the nail on the head. With the politics of taste that were inaugurated early this century substance makes way for charades, for strutting and for many words that cannot be backed by thoughts and ideas. Values have been thrown out of the window and marketing and imagery is all the vogue.

With our politicians busy playing along the weary scripts and jumping from one pleasant bandwagon to the next in the hope of boosting their already bloated caricatures on this stage we have only a huge dramatic performance to look forward to come next national elections. For now we have been regaled with some very ugly scenes that made for a horrible dress rehearsal. 

But let us not forget that there cannot be a play or a charade without an audience. It brings me back to the intelligent use of the vote. It’s not, as many may think, simply an appeal to vote for alternattiva demokratika. It’s a much wider appeal for the citizen to finally live up to this immense responsibility and make the right choices. Look through the candidates. Look at them beyond the colours they represent and seriously ask yourself what you can see them doing six months down the line that can improve the state of your community. Accept any other criterion beyond that and you are making a fool of yourself. 

And as a fool, you might as well join the other pagliacci on stage….

Vesti la giubba,
e la faccia infarina.
La gente paga, e rider vuole qua.
E se Arlecchin t’invola Colombina,
ridi, Pagliaccio, e ognun applaudirà!
Tramuta in lazzi lo spasmo ed il pianto
in una smorfia il singhiozzo e ‘l dolor, Ah!

Ridi, Pagliaccio,
sul tuo amore infranto!
Ridi del duol, che t’avvelena il cor!