Opinion: It’s a sick government, and what does that say about us?

“The party begins!” yelled Jan-Erik Olsson while firing a submachine gun at the ceiling of the Kreditbank in Stockholm shortly after it opened on 23 August 1973.

He went on to take four hostages, who, over the course of a six-day hijack, took the side of their captors and protected them from the police, even accepting to get shot in the foot (though this did not actually transpire) and later refusing to give evidence against the perpetrators in court.

Hostages of abuse and kidnapping sometimes develop a psychological bond with their captors and abusers. This bond results from the power imbalance created by the captors and abusers and the ensuing coping mechanism of the persons captured or abused.

Criminologist and psychiatrist Nils Bejerot coined the term Stockholm Syndrome to describe this phenomenon.

Fast forward 40 years, and a similarly bizarre situation began to unfold locally.

The Labour Party in opposition promised us accountability, transparency, meritocracy and zero tolerance for corruption. It promised a country that belonged to everyone, wherein one would be allowed to work irrespective of political views.

It spoke of an unexplained roadmap and that once elected to power, the Labour Party would hit the ground running trying to achieve it.

The message convinced an enormous majority. The Labour Party enjoyed landslide victories, which gave it immense power and created a power imbalance.

Working towards that infamous unexplained roadmap, the Labour Party started bombarding the people with superlative slogans, aggrandised catchphrases and colourful terminology, which created a feel-good factor.

In conjunction with those empty slogans, the Labour Party and its army of online trolls started convincing the nation that the opposition was negative, past its expiry date, and that it was the enemy of the state because it had the audacity to expose scandals and corruption and dared to speak out when the government failed to act legally and democratically.

Echo chambers on social media turned into fierce vortices, newsrooms were given government direct orders, and the national broadcaster morphed into a propaganda machine.

Government members started avoiding journalists like the plague, appearing only on programmes where every word was choreographed to the last letter.

Objective achieved: spontaneous debate was murdered. Independent journalism was rendered toothless, hard-line critics became obsolete.

Now that the party was gaining momentum, the abuser and the abused having cosied up and become quite intimate, the Labour Party in government could now push forward its agenda to become a nanny state.

It failed to invest in education. It rewarded silence with phantom jobs, direct orders, and the occasional development permit.

It did not encourage individuals to achieve their full potential by working hard and trying their best, but instead sought to pander to their perceived entitlement, justified or otherwise. Free thought and free speech became a thing of the past.

The Labour Party discarded the principles in its statute in favour of populism, which promises everything to everyone, irrespective of merit. When people started to complain, they were treated to financial rewards.

Those magnanimous tax refund cheques that conveniently hit the post at every infrastructural collapse and before every election effectively neutered public dissent and discontent.

The Labour government strategically re-centralised most of the powers delegated to local councils and authorities.

Meritocratic systems instituted by Nationalist governments were deliberately and surreptitiously dismantled, putting ministers back on their almighty pedestal and dishing out pies and crumbs as and to whom they deemed fit.

Most seem to have lost the ability to feel shocked when corruption was exposed. For some, desensitisation even extended to instances which resulted in the abominable deaths of innocent people: Daphne Caruana Galizia, Miriam Pace, Bernice Cassar, Jean Paul Sofia and many other anonymous (nameless and stateless) construction workers.

Could it be that the Labour Party’s level of mental and financial manipulation in government, the nation’s total dependence on the handouts of the government and its entities, the great power imbalance created by self-appointed deities, and the hijacking of the institutions have left many of us under the grasp of the Stockholm Syndrome?

The time to shake ourselves out of this stupor, out of this preordained, defeatist mindset, is now. Deep down, everyone knows that things are not right, that this is a sick government.

Louise Anne Pulis is an MEP candidate. She is a lawyer with a Masters Degree in Human Rights and Democratisation.