The prime minister and the government are doing everything they can to project an image of business as usual. To their loyal local audience that’s not too much of a challenge. Their puppet masters got them to deny their own humanity and continue the hate campaign against Daphne Caruana Galizia exactly where it had left off the morning of the day she died. Getting them to believe her death makes no difference to the country would be for them a walk in the park considering they managed to get people to repeat the vicious slander that she died because she asked for it.
But the international press does not buy that sort of thing. They are not poisoned by the sickening tribalism that pervades this country nor are they conditioned by blinding amoral familism that cancels all sense of right and wrong.
Having read the official statements and seen the initial interviews given by the prime minister and his team, international journalists speaking to me privately confessed reluctance to even pursue the government’s point of view in their reporting. If anything they would seek a government spokesman for that sort of perverse thrill of getting an interview with some villain like Assad or some Brainiac from the Lord’s Resistance Army.
I showed an Italian journalist my blog post on Super 1’s report that MEPs boycotted the European Parliament session. And then I showed her Kurt Farrugia’s on line statement misrepresenting President Antonio Tajani. And she was shocked. No journalist is naïve about fake news. But when fake news is the product of a mainstream party, in government, even on the official twitter account of the chief government spokesman that is North Korea stuff.
It is also why the European Parliament is broadly mistrusting of the Maltese authorities now and driven by the formidable Guy Verhofstadt will not drop the case of Malta just because Joseph Muscat asks him to.
It is significant that with the European Social Democracts and the European People’s Party somehow conditioned by their Maltese membership, the Liberal Democrats are taking a leading role in pressing the EU not to allow this smallest member become more of a problem for Europe.
But the government is acknowledging none of this and is securing its supporters’ acceptance that Daphne Caruana Galizia’s death is nobody’s fault but hers.
Anthropologically it is fascinating that in a country with free flow of information, the official story constructed by the regime is accepted wholesale by a whole chunk of the population without question. No matter how outrageous.
It is what Daphne Caruana Galizia called ‘the other Malta’ where the airwaves of the world do not reach except to broadcast reruns of Scarface. In there they know of Daphne Caruana Galizia though they never read anything she wrote.
What most amazes the journalists who flew here to cover the event, is the political impunity of a government entirely in denial. Here, where no responsibility is taken for anything as we watch our island swallowed up by crime. This conscious attempt at pretending normality is not normal.
And the political crisis is leaking and will leak even more in the economic sphere. For the last few years the revelations of crime at the very top of power have been damaging our reputation with investors.
The EY report, completed will before Daphne Caruana Galizia’s assassination, shows a massive decline in confidence in Malta’s credibility. The mask had already dropped half way when Daphne Caruana Galizia was still alive.
The explosion that killed her blew off what was left of the mask. Now the real pain starts. It was bound to happen, but this political catastrophe is going to precipitate an economic untergang and accelerate the collapse of the house of cards we have built even as Joseph Muscat grins and tries to bear it.
Every single banking transaction leaving Malta to any sensitive jurisdiction – the US, the UK, Switzerland and so on – will be scrutinised as if it was dripping with blood. The face value assessment of every payment will assume it is.
That will slow the payments being made out of this country putting into question the viability of Malta as a gateway for our services industries. Some of those industries will move elsewhere.
The real crisis will hit when expats drive to the airport, and as happened in Dubai in 2008, leave their car in the carpark and fly out on a one-way ticket. There will be many buy-to-let mortgage holders with a problem then. And there will be banks with a problem too.
The government appointee who told the same EY conference a dozen thousand new jobs are in the pipeline for next year may soon have to review some of his projections.
There is a way of arresting this collapse and Joseph Muscat’s method is to wish it away whilst repeating to himself as he frantically bends forward and back that these are the best times. That dream is gone. He knows it, though he still denies it.
He denies it because he cannot admit to himself that the real solution is sending a signal out to the world that we learnt our lessons, that we’re stepping off the speed-train to hell, that we’re going to ask for help before our Faustian contract runs out.
There’s a list of things to do but none of it can be done with Joseph Muscat at the helm. Quite apart from the scandals that should ban him from political life, he is also the representative and the chief motivation of the manic route on the edge of life this country adopted as policy when he came into power. He is the man of the past, a chapter we must close as we wipe up the slime and the mud we’re stuck in.
Joseph Muscat must go.