Now we know. Labour’s Desmond Zammit Marmara has all the answers. And he’s been kind enough to share his insight with the rest of us. The PN lost because of The Shift. You see, their constant criticism of the Labour government infuriated both Labour and floating voters. The country was so mad at the Shift that it decided to vote Labour.
“It is true that the Labour government had many flaws, some of them huge flaws,” Zammit Marmara wrote, “but you cannot keep criticising Labour about everything”. “There was a bombardment of articles where whatever Labour did was construed (impinġi) as wrong,” he added.
Just construed. Not that it was wrong, corrupt, illegal or immoral. Only that The Shift depicted Labour’s wrongdoing as, well, wrong.
According to Zammit Marmara, The Shift must censor itself and think twice about what to report. If it really has to report the facts it could at least mellow its tone. It could at least turn down its outrage at Labour’s blatant abuse of power.
The Shift should learn from TVM about how to bury bad news and hide embarrassing scandals or couch them in such a way that the ruling Labour government is not shown up as bad as it really is. Because you just can’t keep annoying Labour voters with the truth all the time. That’s just too much.
Sharing the blame for the PN’s defeat with The Shift, according to Zammit Marmara, was the PN itself. The PN should never have replaced Adrian Delia with somebody “with a dark shadow hanging over him because of failure to pay his taxes”. Especially when the Party’s battle cry was the rule of law and good governance. “You can’t preach about political honesty and integrity when your own leader fails the test,” he said.
When your own leader is involved in financial deals with one accused of kidnapping and recidivism, or suspiciously acquired a sprawling Zejtun ODZ property at a cutdown price just days after all illegalities were sanctioned while he was Planning Authority lawyer, you simply ignore political honesty and integrity. You simply stonewall all questions about your own dodgy past.
When your own leader, on the eve of the general elections, dines with a property mogul with multiple illegalities to his name and whose mega development in Sannat is given the green light a few days later, you simply claim you meet everybody and there was nothing wrong with meeting him.
When your leader rents out his property to Russian oligarchs to help them circumvent the rules to gain citizenship, you don’t make good governance your battle cry. All you have to do to win is stop preaching about political integrity. And discredit all journalists asking awkward questions by launching a pre-emptive strike accusing them of conspiring with the PN at Costa Coffee.
You win by rubbishing all claims about your wrongdoing and calling them “spin” or fake news. You discredit the meticulous detailed investigative work done by courageous journalists by simply refusing to even acknowledge the facts. You decline freedom of information requests. That’s how you do it.
The people are fed up with all this nonsense about political honesty and integrity – that’s why the PN lost, Zammit Marmara contends. Oh, and also because there were “groups of Nationalists, or ex-Nationalists or pro-Nationalists who pursued their own agenda independent of the PN”.
Who might these be? Well, according to Zammit Marmara, it’s NGO Repubblika, Occupy Justice and “the Daphne Caruana Galizia followers”. He concludes they angered many Labour voters and floaters: “These caused the PN a lot of harm”.
Zammit Marmara meticulously explains what it was that irked Labour voters so much – Repubblika, Occupy Justice and ‘the Daphne crowd’ kept painting Caruana Galizia as a national hero. They kept repeating the slogan “Daphne was right”. And they kept organising vigils for four and a half years. This was just too much.
In order to win big in Malta, you must first understand what really truly irritates the Maltese. You have to psychologically analyse the intense deep revulsion of the Maltese public for sanctimonious preaching about integrity. You have to stop exposing scandals. We’re not interested in scandal, or corruption, or murder for that matter.
We really don’t mind-blowing somebody up when they get too nosy. We’re not fussed about handing a €4 billion deal to Ram Tumuluri and his friends. And we’re not really fussed that barely two years into the concession Tumuluri grabbed the money and ran.
We don’t mind paying through our noses for gas bought from Shell through SOCAR for millions more than its market value. We’re not going to get mad because of the millions in direct contracts to our friends and party funders.
We’re not going to get angry because the government’s Transport Authority was condemned by the court for scandalously circumventing the law by secretly extending the Valletta-Birgu ferry service to Zammit Tabona. We’re not going to get hot under the collar just because the government illegally awarded a quarter billion euro SVPR contract to DB and James Caterers.
It doesn’t matter that the Electrogas bid did not even comply with minimum requirements to win the lucrative contract or that it was our own Nexia BT that adjudicated it. Or that Nexia BT also sat on the Vitals adjudication panel.
We’re cool about one of our Cabinet ministers holding a piece of our national heritage in his backyard, or one of our MPs taking thousands from a suspected murderer and protecting him at the council of Europe. We don’t get angry at the thousands of euro Karl Stagno Navarra still collects from the failing Air Malta. Or the thousands Joseph Muscat earned from Accutor AG.
We only get enraged when the truth keeps being brought up and when the past is dug up. “The people aren’t stupid – they can distinguish between writing of quality and politically biased mediocrity,” Zammit Marmara concludes. Obviously, he can’t.
Dear Kevin Cassar,
dear THE SHIFT team,
please take Zammit Marmara’s comments for what they are:
They are praise in disguise. A special recognition that THE SHIFT reaches very many people in Malta. That he is not able to mention one misreport is another special praise in the very high quality of your articles.
His actual statement is:
Excellent work from THE SHIFT-Team, read by many many Maltese.
Then can anyone give us an analysis of why the PN not only lost the election but also decreased it’s votes?
Simple, the majority of Maltese electorate condone corruption,bad governance,croynism,ruination of the environment,unjustices etc. This” permanent electoral majority ” has increased in numbers since 2013 and will continue to increase up to next 2027 elections. Daphne’s brutal assassination did not effect this majority, rather it strenghtened it. It is simply society’s values in freefall. And even if the PN puts the best poltician of the world as leader these people will not be swayed to vote PN.
The decrease was directly proportional to the white goods , government flats and jobs given by the government.
Voter fraud on a massive scale is my answer. They’ve been doing it since 1981. When the institutions generating people’s identity are controlled by the government, with little oversight, you can do what you please and with enough time you will get away with it.
its not just about dead or interdicted people voting, its people with multiple residences, etc. This is my take, as implausible as it sounds!
DZM has always been an idiot. Don’t know why you bother to waste time on his drivel.
I don’t think he’s an idiot.. He probably feels he needed to get back in line with HIS CROWD after falling out with them over his criticism of their god, the KINK. He knows the way his bread is buttered.
Marmara should send his cv to Putin …..sounds like he can get a well paid job out there in Russia precisely at this moment in time.
DZM’s article reads like the tedious twaddle of someone who thinks he’s managed to elevate himself above the PLPN duopoly and all its ramifications.
His article shows that he’s firmly stuck in it.
What do you think this comment shows about you?
Nothing.
The wrong thing is that the PN didn’t engage a researcher like labour did with Zammit Marmara. By giving a brief to set the right questions and secure the correct hypotheses for proper research activity. Sampling correctly and not coordinated with the promotional activity the labour party was engaging in.
It is not strange that labour-leaning trolls continue to come out with their analysis of the PN’s debacle. Look in your own house. Evarist, Jose, might be able to shed more light.
Why don’t you ask those 50K plus who did not vote – and by so doing, give the victory to the LP.
Y’know what, he’s right too…
The Maltese people in general do have an intense deep revulsion of integrity.. Again, generally they are NOT interested in scandal, or corruption, or murder for that matter. It should be obvious by now.
Unless something catastrophic happens, like banks crashing, and the people losing their rainy-day-stash, the Labour bandwagon will roll on its merry way. Labour successfully identified the worst of Maltese traits, and given them free rein, fed and mulched them to thrive end grow and grow, and now they’ve practically overrun the place..
You seem to have missed the point that he uses the same arguments you do to deny freedom of expression, to make us all accept this end as necessary for the few to pillage the country.
But she’s right, isn’t she? It’s only when the whole effing edifice comes crashing down that the Maltese will realise the enormity of the past few years. Most of the Maltese are a bunch of mercenaries more than willing to sell their principles to the highest bidder. A few of us have had enough and some have already left to be able to experience … guess what … a normal life elsewhere. The pool of upstanding intelligent people left in Malta is diminishing by the day. Soon all that will be left is the Tagħna Lkoll Brigade.
I’m not a big Grech fan but he did say something memorable in an interview just before the election: if Labour increases its majority then Daphne would have died for nothing. How sad it is that a journalist gave up her life for a country not worth saving.
How does Bernard Grech know she would not have called him out on his tax avoidance, at the very least? Did he or anyone else ever consider that? A journalist’s duty is to scrutinise those in power, and she would have, given the chance. But to claim to be the solution to all she opposed in terms of government corruption is arrogant. She didn’t get to express herself, and doing it on her behalf is just wrong.
Thank you DZM for outlining that Labourites dutifully removed the door. Everyone knew they would.
But his lightweight reasoning is way off, and he knows it.
Point out to an obese person that they risk health problems and they think of tempering their appetite.
Labourites are Goebbling more than ever. I guarantee its a cult.
The sad truth is that we Maltese are greedy and don’t care if their elected politicians are corrupt or steal from the national coffers. We are happy as long as we receive a pittance of €100 cheque by post. We actually embrace corruption mistakenly believing that if they can do it so can we as the majority think that they are equal to Labour’s small inner circle. Today, there isn’t so much difference in ideology between the two main parties therefore the Labour Party will only lose its grip on power if we Maltese start losing purchasing power due to increases in tax or other utilities.
This is like they are peddling the concept that Malta is essentially all socialist, for the reason that PN lost with 40K votes. There is a systematic and deliberate annihilation of PN happening
Marmara has been shown to be a stooge after the declarations by two ex Cabinet Ministers.
What Herrera and Evarist Bartolo stated. These two confirmed what Shift News , Truth , PN and Daphne said.
Bartolo took the proverbial Angel Shafted up the Village Feast Decorations, position.
To be clear – PBS and One are NOT media. Just PR disguised as such.
Has anyone thought that the elections (all since 2008) are being rigged somehow by a strategy which is invisible and full proof at least until now? It is this or the majority is completely brainwashed. If there is really rigging very, very few people know about it otherwise there are bound to be leaks. In 2008 I think that the rigging failed by a hair thickness and that is why LP accepted defeat there and then lest the truth would have been exposed by demanding investigations. Since 2008 this rigging business has been refined.
I feel that unless a national issue is at stake the PN will keep on losing. Independence, Democracy , European membership, the Euro were all vital issues which went beyond partisan politics. The thinking voters clearly understood where our future prosperity lay. Labour voters too. I remember Lino Spiteri admtting that he had voted for Europe too! So
many others did. The situation today is vastly different. There are no major national issues involved. Europe to a great extent has solved the future. Europe has delivered security. As a consequence people are now more
interested in themselves; in the self. The LP recog nised this right from the start, I feel . Once the European issue was settled the Labout Party targeted the individual and tailored accordingly. We see it happening continously.
I can mention Divorce, LG BTQ, Cannabis, clientalism as a few examples. They all involve issues that concern people individually. The PN here lost out because its main focus was the economy and building an adequate infrastructure.
or maybe the PN lost just because they are a bunch of dinosaurs, with zero touch with what’s going on. People that like a lot of labourites, are addicted to public positions for the last 3 decades, and returning nothing (professionally and morally) to the country. Also I think Adrian Delia’s proximity with a criminal (or several) ended up being the bullet in the head’s party. that was the last/only chance to get a momentum, but we all know how the movie ended.