Populism’s useful idiots

It was Churchill (who according to Trump, Starmer isn’t) who had pointed out that democracy is the least worst system. A rather less illustrious commentator, some time before Joseph Muscat was elected in 2013, had mumbled something about even Hitler having been “democratically” elected.

If the last decade has demonstrated anything, it is that inherent in democracy there is one catastrophic design flaw: the voters.

Take Brexit as an example, the pathetic exercise resulted in the Brits expressing irritation with Brussels bureaucrats by kneecapping themselves.  A country that had an empire upon which the sun never set ended up arguing about chlorinated chicken and customs declarations for artisanal cheese.

Hovering over this was Nigel Farage, the oafish pub bore who somehow found himself interviewed on national television for 20 years straight. He built an entire career on racist grievance, insular slogans and fantasy economics.

Britain is lurching toward his Reform UK, with concentration camps and immigrant hunts being promised.

The irony is exquisite. Brexit was sold as liberation from dishonest elites with a campaign fronted by thinly-disguised racists who treated truth as an optional lifestyle choice. Farage’s relationship with facts has always resembled Trump’s: evasive, selective and deeply suspicious.

The stench of financial murk, questionable funding ecosystems and opportunistic self-enrichment that seems permanently attached to modern populism follows them both around like stale cigar smoke.

Does that sound familiar, the anti-establishment revolutionaries ending up doing remarkably well for themselves?

Around the same time, we got Trump: The First Installation.

Trump’s appeal was fuelled by the corruption allegations, legal chaos, conflicts of interest and grotesque self-absorption. The performance became the point. Outrage became proof of authenticity. Criminal investigations were repackaged as martyrdom.

Sound familiar?  And that was only Trump1.0

Then came Boris Johnson. Brexit’s deputy cheerleader-in-chief bumbled in on a wave of vapid slogans and manufactured optimism, only for the entire enterprise eventually to collapse into scandal, chaos and the economic horrors of Liz Lettuce.

Here, we had the 2013 sunrise reprised in 2017. Muscat’s government was already trailing corruption allegations like used toilet paper stuck to its shoe, but the electorate’s response was essentially: “Yes, but the economy…” or in the vernacular “u iva ħalluna naqilgħu lira”.

The truly dark aspect is that the scandals were out there in full view. The warnings were explicit. And yet, he got in again.

Cue Trump: The Sequel.  Democracy now resembles one of those reality television competitions where the public repeatedly votes to keep the most unstable contestant in the villa because it makes better car-crash television, never mind letting slip the dogs of war.

Are we heading further down the rabbit hole ourselves at the end of May?

Will Malta once again decide that cash-register vibes, tribalism and transactional bribery matter more than governance, accountability and basic standards of public decency?

Will we again reward the political culture that transformed corruption into background wallpaper?

Or perhaps, maybe, the slightly encouraging Hungarian result may hint at something else: that electorates are not permanently trapped in political Stockholm Syndrome.

Mind you, history, local and wider, does not encourage optimism. Democracy, after all, is a system built entirely upon faith in collective wisdom, and we all know where that road leads.

When you get Abela boasting that not only were workers going to get a €1,000 iced bun each, he’s managed to leave out those filthy foreigners, the roadmap is as clear as day, if uncosted.

Appeal to avarice and insularity, and you have a sure-fire way of galvanising Labour’s finest.