Last week my blog published my 2010
follow-up to this study. Entitled 'Malta'sLabour Party and the Politics of Hegemony', the paper argued that Labour's
strategy under Joseph Muscat, which I dubbed 'politics without adversaries' is akin to convenient alliance-building for
electoral purposes, one that may turn out to be effective only for maintaining
the status quo. In last weeks' blog I argued that in hindsight, and taking into consideration Malta's current
political crisis, we can say that under Muscat, Labour's alliances exceeded the
boundaries of what we normally include within electoral strategy in liberal
democracies.
In the meantime, in 2013
I co-authored another study on Malta's Labour Party with University of Malta
colleague Prof Roderick Pace. Entitled 'Malta', the study comprised a chapterin the Palgrave Handbook of Social Democracy in the European Union (Edited by Jean-Michel de Waele, Fabien Escalona and Mathieu
Vieira).
This
study looked into Labour's history, organization, electoral results, relation
to power and institutions and programmatic positioning.
Pace and I argued that the
main challenge of Malta’s Labour Party in the 2010s was to be in Government:
Save for the brief 22-month interval between 1996 and 1998, Labour had been in
opposition since 1987. Prior to 1996, the last time the Party won a majority of
votes in a general election was in 1976.
We added that for this reason, winning
the general election became almost an end in itself, more than a means to
an end. We stated that judging the Party’s strategy under Muscat’s leadership, it can be seen
as attempting a replica of its 1996 strategy, creating a politics without
adversaries, which attempts to bypass conflicting interests, as I argued in my
2010 study.
Therefore, we argued, in this case, the
2013 electoral victory also represents a balancing act attempting to reconcile
the various interests which Labour had managed to persuade in its favour prior
to the general election. We also hypothesized that conversely, Labour’s
victory can also be interpreted as a means to an end. A new hegemonic formation
might have been constructed, as happened under Mintoff’s premiership during
the 1970s; then, Malta’s welfare state was radically expanded and various
changes took place in economic and foreign policy, inspired by socialist and
nationalist ideology, in a context of patronage, as I argued in my 2001
study.
Thus, in 2013 Roderick Pace and I
concluded that with Labour now in government, it would be interesting to
observe how the ‘moderate and progressive’ banner can be transposed in terms of
policy, and whether this will represent a shift from the Nationalist hegemonic
formation which had begun in 1987 and which was inspired by ideologies such as
Catholicism and consumerism.
Malta's current political crisis sheds much light on Labour's governance. Scholarly studies in political sociology and political science can
substantiate evidence from the past 6 years through analysis.
