Politics Zero

They kicked off. The campaigns that is. By some unwritten conspiracy I was meant to leave the island the day it all went into top gear – only just. I was still in Malta when Joseph Muscat’s team went for the mother of all gimmicks and gave us the midnight launch. Did we need to wait for midnight in order to get a three word “slogan” that is simply a tautological confirmation of blandness? Of course we did not.

But Joseph’s party are carried away on the wings of enthusiasm. The theatrical and the dramatic are peaking in this election. It is not only the election of “social media” but also the election that reaps the very harmful work of the PN spin team back in ’08. Remember the campaign based on “taste”? Remember the campaign based on images and persons? Well this is a natural corollary. Labour, ever the unwitting follower, is now banking on just that : image.

Let’s look at the basics. The thrust of the campaign until now (Labour’s, we’ll get to the nationalist one later don’t worry) has been a skimpy idea of unity against divisiveness. After five years of complaining about everything under the sun we now have an appeal of unity and working together for a better Malta (because Malta is everybody’s). The Italians have a word for this attitude : “buonismo”. Suddenly Labour and rent-a-pundits like Musumeci are all into Gandhi style philosophies. Panto has been extended and the buzzword is “Be nice to each other”.

It’s an escape routine. By focussing on the idea that this is politics of conciliation of sorts Labour gets to once again evade the battleground of real policy (we’ll also see in a later post how this business of energy tariffs is anything but concrete).” They’re getting to love it. The fad Obama style campaign suits Muscat’s propensity towards showmanship. Louis Grech, the latest addition to the bandwagon of emptiness, shoots buzzwords faster than a partisan armed with a sten gun.

The nationalist party has replied with a sustained campaign of its own. The ribbon style of mychoice.pn could not come across any more fake than it already had until the official launch. Now we have the page full of testimonials explaining why they would vote PN. It’s choc-a-bloc with wives, fathers and relatives of PN activists, politicians or of people who have an economic interest in keeping the status quo. Why I’d vote PN? Because my husband gets loads of good work off the back of certain projects that’s why. You won’t see THAT written on the mychoice pages.

The PN machine also kicked off by mocking Labour for copying their slogan from British politicians and their logo from Obama. It was bad enough that this was coming from a party that had unabashedly plagiarised Mr Sarkozy’s campaign last time round, we also discovered that this time it was MSNBC and MSN that would be providing the inspiration for the new party campaign logo. Again we got loads and loads of image including Simon and Lawrence looking like a blue version of old pictures of Mao Tse Tung’s communist posters (or Obama – take your pick).

The multiplicity of colours used by both camps is an attempt to appeal to everyone and appear inclusive. Remember the “anything goes” bandwagon of 2008? Well the circus is back in town. We will also be seeing in a future post how the first impressions from the PN manifesto lead us to believe that while someone in the PN is eager to call a spade a spade, the final text of the manifesto still went through some Orwellian revisions (that’s a new fad too) on order to make some commitments appear much more liberal than they really are.

It’s gearing up to be interesting and J’accuse promises many more posts once we have settled back down in the Lux routine. For now we have the Politics Zero. In the meantime do not let the parties faze you with their special effects. Keep asking questions, and remember: everybody lies.

And yes… AD’s logo does look suspiciously like a drunken BP logo…but with AD you know where you stand. Which cannot really be said about our friends at the PLPN shop.