I’ve seen remarks by some civil society advocates reminding the government of our neutrality obligations and insisting Malta refuses to take sides in the conflict in Eastern Europe. People who make these remarks studiously avoid identifying Russia as an aggressor. They falsely equate “the two sides” and urge Malta to remain equidistant from them. For [...]

This is what passes for political discourse on the eve of a general election. This headline translates as “Payment cheques all year round if you vote to get them”. Robert Abela, addressing the elderly, sums up his political stump speech to what elections should never be, a transaction. Social services and support are presented as [...]

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 [...]

Scandals have emerged in the last few months of traffic fines issued by traffic wardens thrown in the fire of oblivion to help someone dodge the law. In one case it appears to have allowed a business tycoon (and suspected criminal) to profiting from a racket of charging their clients for traffic fines that are [...]

I chose that title because I want to push back on some of the headlines that covered yesterday the announcement that someone that is supposed to answer to the name “Fr David Muscat’s sister” is contesting the upcoming general elections. Fr David Muscat is the rabid racist who says grace at the fenkati presided by [...]

While we’re busy celebrating the fact that Marsascala Creek will not after all be claimed by a yacht marina, there’s some serious geo-political shifting happening on the Continent. I don’t seriously expect the goings on at the Ukrainian border to become an electoral issue. Though if things go down a darker road we will wonder [...]

This is a post by Massimo Zammit, a self-declared fan of Labour Minister José Herrera. Someone has to be, so that’s not terrible in and of itself. Except that Massimo Zammit is CEO of Teatru Manoel, a government organisation that reports to José Herrera. It is bad enough that Ministers hire cronies to run their [...]

Not only did the government dramatize its reversal on the Marsascala marina, packaging it as good news and a miracle of democracy. They had to serialise it as well to maximise the political benefit from doing bugger all. First Chris Fearne got a round of applause for partly disagreeing with the project. Then Owen Bonnici [...]

In its 1996 general election campaign, the PN borrowed an idea from the Tories’ attempt to demonise Tony Blair and stuck the top half of Alfred Sant’s face to the bottom of a campaign poster headlined “Ma Tistax Tafdah”, “you can’t trust him”. Anecdotally that poster, a first brush with explicitly negative campaigning, caused the [...]

Google requires its advertisers to be transparent about how much money they spend in political advertising. The reason the rules exist is that advertising a political party or a candidate is not like selling chocolate, it is not just a matter of money. If democracy and voter behaviour become purely an extension of how much [...]

For years Claudio Grech was my colleague, and for years he was my direct supervisor. I have more reasons than most to feel regret he has left front line politics without the country getting the chance of having him run a government department for a few years. Whether Labour or Nationalist, genuinely competent, calm, and [...]

Mark Camilleri, an antediluvian Marxist, an inveterate Mintoffjan, a former delegate of the Labour Party, someone who voted for Joseph Muscat and was keen to see him made prime minister, declared yesterday that the country needs the PN to save it. His logic is unimpeachable. He hasn’t started liking the PN. He just thinks, as [...]

Stephen Montefort stood at a Labour Party event to tell us we should not trust doctors, we should not trust science, we should not trust medicine, and we should not trust epidemiology. That’s because we have a better doctor in Robert Abela whom Stephen Montefort commends to us as a fount of infallible knowledge on [...]

This is a screenshot from Robert Abela's Facebook page. This photo, one would expect, is Robert Abela's campaign photo, the most important visual asset in what appears to be the central theme of this election campaign. So I have one question. Why isn't Abela looking at us? Why can't he look us in the eye?

Ireland looks set to be the first EU jurisdiction to introduce laws to limit the use of strategic lawsuits filed by people seeking to shut journalists or activists up with courtroom bullying. The proposed changes are included in a report by Justice Minister Helen McEntee to Ireland’s Cabinet in preparation of the publication of a [...]

There are 33 days left in the life of this Parliament, the most disgraceful in living memory. It started out with the foreseeable re-election of Joseph Muscat with an unforeseeably larger majority over his 2013 election.  Keith Schembri climbed back into his office in Castille. Konrad Mizzi was made super-minister. Chris Cardona would reach the [...]

For the years in between general elections political parties keep up the burden of running TV stations, radio stations, newspapers, and online and social media presence, to keep oiled and hot the engines of electioneering. For all that time they suffocate political discourse by reducing everything, absolutely everything, to the zero-sum game of one side [...]

Pope Francis is due to visit Malta a week after the next general election. He didn’t mean it that way and, word is, he was told it would not be that way. It’s going to be awkward. This country does not wake up indifferent to an election result. So fair and foul a week as [...]

Even after the trauma of the last four years, the violence that killed Daphne Caruana Galizia, the enormity of the economic price of grey-listing, the social costs of a widening economic gap and the promise of greater tax burdens to pay for the cost of our isolation in the world ... even after all that, [...]

I still remember a heated discussion I had with an old friend just before the last election. She was getting ready to vote one of the small parties because she was disgusted by the corruption of Muscat’s government and still shuddered at the thought of Lawrence Gonzi’s ministers getting back into power. I gave her [...]