Elections: manifestly, yes… but no

It’s not the first time I’ve been in wonderment, but last Sunday the wonderment became difficult to ignore.

I gazed in wonderment on the audacity with which a straight face was maintained while the mouth was spewing potential porkies like an assembly line on steroids.

“It’s nearly ready,” Bobby told us, with the air of a waiter soothing a table whose capricciosa has been “just about to come out” for the last half hour. He was referring, of course, to Labour’s electoral manifesto for the elections that are not happening. Absolutely not. Categorically not. Stop asking.

“Nearly ready.” Two words doing heroic work in Maltese politics, right up there with “consultation exercise” and “lessons have been learnt”- phrases which, like stage props, are wheeled out whenever reality threatens to intrude.

So let’s get this straight. We have a governing party finalising a full electoral manifesto.

For no elections.

We are expected to believe that this is entirely normal. Governance as method acting: they are not preparing for a vote, merely inhabiting the role of people who might, in some abstract future, consider making a bid to be re-elected.

Manifestly, this is either preparation for elections or it isn’t. It cannot be both.

And yet here we are, invited to applaud the intellectual gymnastics of a Prime Minister who performs the political equivalent of the Dance of the Seven Veils – now you see elections, now you don’t. Each verbal item of flimsy lingerie is delicately removed as circumstances require.

One suspects that at some point, perhaps between one gym session and the next, the narrative will pirouette with balletic grace from “no elections” to “the people deserve to express their democratic will immediately, if not sooner.”

At which point the “nearly ready” manifesto will undergo its final transformation. It will move from a theoretical manifesto (definitely not for elections) to an actual manifesto (entirely for elections, obviously), possibly followed by a revised edition (kindly forget what was said last week).

Or perhaps we can skip even making the effort and simply change the cover and increase the font size.

Because let’s be honest: the only thing that moves faster than the drafting of this document is the retrofitting of the narrative once the writ is issued. Memory will be whitewashed with industrial efficiency. Favours will circulate. Iced buns will appear. And the electorate will be gently encouraged to scribble that No. 1 in the correct place.

All the while maintaining the polite fiction: ‘’Yes, yes, perfectly reasonable. One always prepares detailed electoral manifestos in peacetime. Nothing to see here.’’

But how difficult would it be, just once, for the Malta Labour Party (to give it its real, harking-back-to-the-past, name) to drop the nonsense and say, plainly, what everyone already understands?

Something like, ‘’You want things. We will give you things. In return, you forget everything, and we mean everything, that has happened over the past decade and vote for us anyway.’’

That’s it. That’s the manifesto. Print it on a napkin. Save the rainforest. Economise on bandwidth.

But no, we will still get the usual 100-page epic: a political tapas menu in which every demographic is offered a carefully plated promise. A tax tweak here, a scheme there, an infrastructure project that will be completed sometime between “soon” and “don’t ask again.”

All delicately seasoned with the language of “sustainability” and “good governance,” deployed with the confidence of a man explaining gravity to a falling object. And hovering above it all, like a patron saint of plausible deniability, is the insistence that this is not about elections.

Manifestly, it is. Or it isn’t. Oh well, as long as it keeps the other bunch on their toes, poised to take over when the electorate finally decides to stop playing along with Abela’s whimsies, there’s a black lining to the silver cloud.