Joseph Muscat is nowhere to be seen (yet) at formal Labour Party events. But apparently, he’s very much in demand at constituency events organised by Labour Party candidates. And he’s obliging.
There’s something profoundly disturbing in this. Labour Party candidates continue to consider a friendly relationship with Joseph Muscat, even the public reception of his blessing, as an electoral asset. And since I firmly believe in the market behaviour of general elections, I have no doubt they’re right. Many, many, many supporters of the Labour Party still think Joseph Muscat is the kink. (Not a typo).
Where does that leave us? It feels ridiculous to predict an ill fate for a political party that enjoys so much support. Whatever wrong Labour does attract more new voters to them. I’m not sure where causality lies but the pattern is too stubborn not to be correlated. Labour’s bloating growth well beyond any previously known limits of popularity feels like a blob from a 1950s B movie. The blob will just continue to grow until there’s nothing but the blob left.
At the risk of sounding ridiculous, which is a bit of a habit of mine, the dynamic of official exclusion and unofficial hero worship of Joseph Muscat amounts to the seeds that will grow into the eventual destruction of Robert Abela’s government.
In the strangest of ways, we are seeing something we often miss in our democracy: a distinction between the party as party and the party in government. The way our politicians avoid that distinction is to personify both sides of this dichotomy in the individual person of the party leader, a bit like the mystery of the trinity but missing the dove.
Joseph Muscat, having been forced to let go of the leadership of the party in government, is clawing back his hold on the leadership of the party as party. Right now, the two roles share an imperative interest on which neither side can afford to compromise: Labour must win, and resoundingly so.
But interests between Muscat and Abela will not always be convergent. On the contrary, the fact that Joseph Muscat is hogging so much space that should (from Abela’s perspective) rightly belong to the party leader proper, suggests that Joseph Muscat fully expects those interests to be against each other. He is positioning himself to have his way at the expense of Robert Abela.
Watching them and their behaviour is not unlike being at a wedding where the groom’s conversations with the maid of honour are uncomfortably inconsonant with the enthusiasm he should be expected to show towards his bride.
Everyone thinks it but nobody says it: this won’t last.