Between one May Day and the next

It is only with hindsight that we can understand what 1 May 2017 meant for the Joseph Muscat administration.

We now understand better that the Egrant allegation pushed the prime minister to take an awesome gamble – to go to the country a full year before its term, to fight the election as the victim of a huge smear, to be on the side of positivity against all the negativity of Simon Busuttil and his media campaign.

The start was 1 May when a huge crowd filled every space in Castille Square right down to the road leading up to it. There have been bigger crowds both before and after that but the sheer numbers of that crowd on 1 May gave a very strong signal that people were responding to the Labour campaign.

From then onwards, the campaign swept downwards as more and more people saw the writing on the wall and swung to Labour, people who maybe in the previous election had voted PN. The 3 June tsunami for Labour was born.

A year has passed and 1 May has come round again. There is no election coming, except the EP one and the local council one in 13 months’ time. But the prime minister is once again sounding the tocsin and urging all supporters to gather this time in Tritons’ Square, a vast expanse so far untested by mass meetings.

What happened in the intervening time was the election result, the disintegration in PN ranks and above all the murder of Malta’s best-known journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.

Other things have happened as well. The many libel cases instituted over the past years mostly against Daphne have continued their long trek at the Law Courts, except for the ones instituted by the new PN leader, and have yet to come to a conclusion.

The investigation on Daphne’s death has led to the arraignment of three Maltese persons but it does not seem to have led to any leads as to the motive behind the assassination and the mastermind behind it.

There have been many theories put forward for the assassination but no proof has surfaced so far. It is highly probable the killing was not for any personal reason but it seems more than probable the killing had to do with what Daphne wrote about, mostly Maltese politics. There is however a school of thought that argues she was silenced before breaking a very important story she was writing about.

Daphne’s killing has spawned an army of intrepid followers who, grouped under various titles have organized sit-ins, camp-ins at Castille, protests galore and mainly kept the candles burning at the Daphne shrine in front of the Law Courts, despite an unseen hand sweeping the candles and flowers clean on no less than nine occasions.

There is a separate and distinct seam of the post-Daphne era that has focused on the allegations made by Daphne alleging that Minister Konrad Mizzi and businessman-cum-PM aide Keith Schembri owning accounts in Panama and other shady jurisdictions.

These allegations reached new heights when the US authorities arrested the head of the Pilatus Bank in Malta for (unconnected) money laundering activities. Pilatus Bank was where, according to Daphne and to the Russian whistleblower, transfers were made by the family of the Azerbaijan leadership to select Maltese including Dr Muscat’s wife, an allegation hotly denied by the Muscat family.

These allegations have spawned innumerable articles about Malta in the world’s press and they have been almost unanimously negative in tone. A group comprising the best papers in the free world have come together in the Daphne Project to continue investigating further the stories Daphne was working on.

Other investigations by journalists have unearthed millions of files alleging corruption links and will no doubt lead to further allegations.

These are all, so far, ‘smoking guns’ and while this may be enough in many other jurisdictions to lead to resignations, they have controversially not led to any resignation in Malta, not even of a third level person. This, the world is telling Malta, is just not enough.

Those whose names have been mentioned in this regard hold on tight to Joseph Muscat as Dr Muscat holds on to them. They stick together as otherwise they will fall together. This also includes the institutions that supervise the financial sector such as the FIAU and the MFSA which recently had changes at the top caused by generational turnover, but the new heads have yet to prove that a new level has been reached.

Now Dr Muscat, speaking last Sunday the day after he was publicly jeered and humiliated as he entered an IIP do in London, has invited his supporters to do on 1 May what they did on 1 May last year –turn up in in their masses at Tritons’ Square to defend the government. To show their reaction to all the stories about Malta that are being believed by the whole world but not by a huge chunk of Malta and to dismiss the Daphne and post-Daphne allegations with the government spin of a Malta at peace and enjoying economic growth and enjoyment by all.