by Carlo Bonini
Daphne’s report came in April 2017, although Muscat had been widely suspected of links to the Panama Papers scandal for some time. Muscat denied the story and set up a magisterial inquiry into himself and his wife. He claimed the affair put into question the political stability of the country and called an early general election which he won convincingly three months later.
As he climbed the steps of the Auberge de Castille – the seat of the prime minister in Valletta – he claimed that popular support had wiped his slate clean. Stability had been restored by popular acclamation.
And so Daphne’s questions remained unanswered and her death put a stop to her relentless journalism. Most of the country behaved as if the questions were not worth the bother. Muscat presided over a period of undoubted economic well-being. Few wanted to think too hard about the honesty of their prime minister when the country’s economic prosperity could not be doubted.
On the eve of Daphne Caruana Galizia’s killing, Muscat was at his most popular. He had barely known a time without general adulation. His easy charm landed him his first political job in his 20s, as an anchor for the TV station owned by the PL.
In Malta, political parties are allowed to own and operate broadcast media outlets and take a considerable share of the newspaper business as well. That fact alone is perhaps the most convincing explanation for the extreme polarisation within the country.
It started out innocently enough. Until 1987, the PL administration of the time imposed a strict state monopoly on broadcast media. Even owning walkie-talkies or an amateur radio set could land you in jail. This allowed the government to exploit the state broadcasting monopoly to the hilt. To illustrate the point, for several years the very name of the leader of the opposition – Eddie Fenech Adami – was banned from state radio and TV. He was, quite literally, unmentionable.
In order to make their voice heard on the airwaves in the 1980s, the Nationalists (PN) used contacts in Sicily to set up their own amateur TV station and broadcast their message. The host, Richard Muscat, was warned he would be arrested if he returned to Malta and effectively ended up in exile, waiting for a change in administration.
That came in 1987. One of the first political initiatives of the new PN administration was to ensure that ‘never again’ would there be a repeat of its banishment from the broadcast media. It opened its own radio and TV stations but also passed a law opening up broadcasting to pluralism and symbolically, but very significantly, handed over to the opposition its first broadcast licences.
They created a monster. The people of Malta have been given mutually exclusive and contradictory renditions of reality for 30 years. The public broadcaster continues to be dominated by government party control, while the parties own a TV station each and employ ‘journalists’ who act, more often than not, as propagandists.
Maltese audiences effectively get Pravda and Izvestia and, since they cannot reconcile the factual contradictions between the different versions they receive, many simply choose to believe the party line.
In 1991, Malta applied to join the EU. The process of accession proved drawn out as geo-political circumstances changed dramatically during the 90s. With the collapse of the Soviet military block, formerly neutral countries such as Sweden, Finland, and Austria were given precedence over Malta, joining the block in 1995.
Malta and Cyprus were then pinned to the new democracies of Eastern Europe and had to wait for the latter to be ready to be allowed in.
This gave the PL plenty of space to excite suspicions of foreign interference which came intuitively to an island people with a history of colonisation. PL warned of all sorts of catastrophic consequences of EU membership: compulsory military service in European wars, an unbridled invasion of Sicilian hairdressers, the shut-down of local manufacturing, even an increase in AIDS patients.
In the run, up to the referendum on EU accession in 2003, Joseph Muscat hosted the flagship TV programme which warned of the Armageddon that would inescapably follow EU accession. He was one of the faces of the No vote, perhaps second only to Alfred Sant (PL).
The people of Malta voted 52-48 to join the EU, a loss for the PL which had campaigned against. Notwithstanding, PL supporters celebrated in the streets, as the party line was that, taking into account the number of eligible voters who had abstained, the tally showed that the Yes vote was in reality a minority of total voters.
The matter was settled definitively by snap elections in 2003 that elected the Nationalist Party. Malta joined the EU in 2004 and the Labour Party, now stripped of the overriding mission that had dominated its politics since the 1970s, went into an existential crisis.
It did not rally until 2008 when Alfred Sant, having lost his third general election in a row, finally decided to call it a day, creating a vacancy in the party leadership.
Between 2004 and 2008, Joseph Muscat was no wallflower. In 2004, facing the irreversible reality of Malta’s EU membership, the eurosceptic campaigner contested and resoundingly won a seat as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP).
Contesting general elections in Malta is a parochial affair. Malta is split into 13 constituencies, each electing five MPs. This focuses contact with voters to the local level, even for the most prominent and nationally significant politicians.
But Malta is a single constituency that elects six representatives to the European Parliament. This means that candidates have to have a countrywide profile, considerable brand recognition, and a substantial war chest to finance a national campaign.
Joseph Muscat’s TV past prepared him for the job like nothing else could.
It is no coincidence that the most successful candidate in the 2004 MEP elections was Simon Busuttil, the most recognisable TV-friendly face of the Yes vote and the architect of the PN government’s ‘let’s convince you with the facts’ pro-EU effort.
Joseph Muscat used his European Parliament platform to make the transition from rabid fearmonger and forecaster of doom to a mainstream, youthful, fresh social democrat, the Maltese version of a young Tony Blair.
It worked. In 2008, with the resignation of Alfred Sant, the PL’s leadership was his for the taking. The PL would no longer have to tacitly apologise for having been on the wrong side of the EU membership debate. Muscat would simply make everyone forget it ever had a problem with it.
In one of his earliest interviews as party leader, Muscat acknowledged that ‘with hindsight’ those in favour of EU membership had won the 2003 referendum. That, in itself, was a reversal of PL dogma and no less dramatic for the listeners who had known the truth all along.
That reversal signalled that the PL was no longer hostile to EU membership and, since there was no longer any danger of reversing membership, it could now be trusted with government.
Needless to say, Daphne, who had started her blog Running Commentary in 2008, fulminated against what she considered manifest hypocrisy. During the EU membership campaign, Daphne wrote a newspaper column in which she had adopted principally cultural arguments for membership. She understood that what would sway most people would be the amount of money the EU would pay Malta to join. But she found that approach crass and vulgar.
She did, however, see EU membership as a form of guarantee to prevent Malta from falling back to the Iron Curtain-flavoured excesses of the 1970s and 1980s. She was also a champion of freedom of movement, thinking it would help the younger population, including her children, grow if they could be given the opportunity to study and work abroad. She was particularly sensitive to this topic, because she felt she had been trapped in Malta when a PL government shut down her sisters’ school and arrested her for daring to protest the schools closure.
But she saw no conviction in the new found euro-enthusiasm of Joseph Muscat and the PL after 2008, merely political convenience.
In 2008, the PN won the election by a whisker. Fewer than 2,000 votes separated the two parties. In Parliament, prime minister Lawrence Gonzi (PN) presided over a single-seat majority.
A small majority stuck with the PN in 2008 because they were still concerned Alfred Sant could take Malta out of the EU. When Sant stood down and his successor shelved euro-scepticism, voters remembered all the reasons they had grown bored of or annoyed with the PN which had been in government since 1987, save for a 22-month hiatus in 1996-98.
No one had any illusion that the 2008-13 legislature would not be the PN’s last in government. But not everyone in the PN was ready to go down with the ship.
By his own account, PN malcontent-in-chief John Dalli had grown close to Muscat and became the ‘father confessor’ of PN backbenchers who could extract promises of reward from a future PL government in exchange for causing trouble for Gonzi.
Jesmond Mugliett (PN) was left out of the cabinet after the 2008 election because, as transport minister previously, he had been tainted by a series of bribery scandals in his department. The PL, until now his harshest critics, charmed him into rubbishing Gonzi’s government. After 2013, when the PL was returned to power, his architecture firm would be rewarded with significant government contracts.
Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando (PN) felt entitled to a post in the cabinet but was left out because his character was deemed erratic. He voted against his own government on a series of bills, exposing the weakness of Lawrence Gonzi’s government. He then joined forces with the PL, successfully campaigning for a referendum introducing divorce that exposed the vulnerability of the Catholic-liberal coalition that forms the PN. After 2013, he was rewarded by being allowed to keep his post as executive chairman of the Malta Council for Science and Technology.
Franco Debono (PN) was surprised at being left out of cabinet, although his lack of skill and talent made it a surprise to no one else. He voted with the Opposition on several bills including, in 2013, on a finance bill that forced the government out. He was appointed law commissioner by the PL government in 2013, and entrusted with revising laws and leading constitutional reform, none of which he achieved.
All these characters took turns to cripple Gonzi’s government in a death by a thousand cuts and all of them felt the heat of Daphne’s fiery criticism. She dug into their character flaws.
Often, the criticism became rather personal. Having campaigned for divorce, Pullicino Orlando found himself having to marry his long-term girlfriend. Predictably, the very public, political marriage proved to be a disaster and Daphne documented Pullicino Orlando’s extra-marital affairs and public bouts of alcohol abuse.
Muscat knew just what buttons to press in order to ensnare MPs from the PN and ensure that the party languished in political limbo for a long time to come. A combination of flattery, charm, and the promise of great rewards worked on just enough people for word to spread.
Joseph Muscat became someone ‘you could do business with’. Business interests lined up at the PL’s headquarters to meet him. This raised the hackles of more ideological PL politicians, the old timers who were slowly eased away from the levers of the party machine.
Anġlu Farrugia, the man who as police inspector had unlawfully detained the young Daphne, became deputy leader of the PL in 2008. After Muscat pushed him out in 2012, Farrugia told newspapers he was worried about the secret deals his party leader was making with business interests.
As the prospect of a PL win in 2013 became ever more certain, the PN’s donors dried up. It was being increasingly seen as a poor investment, whereas the PL was a sure bet.
In 2008 the PL could barely finance its electoral campaign. As 2013 approached, its fortunes were reversed. The PL’s campaigning was lavish, using resources never before seen in previous electioneering in the country.
Public events, advertising, audio-visual productions, social media campaigning: all seemed to be paid for from a bottomless warchest.
As the 2013 confrontation approached, the resources on the two sides could not have been more imbalanced.
Lawrence Gonzi’s government had been undermined and had limped through its last five years of tenure. His party was poorly resourced and every euro spent on propaganda dug deeper into its overdraft. People were generally unhappy with the PN. They had been in power for nearly 25 years and had made some bad decisions. The fact that Gonzi had steered an economy dependant on banking and finance through the 2008 financial crisis to the extent that the domestic impact was virtually imperceptible did not win him any points.
Meanwhile, Muscat had spent the five years before the 2013 election, reaping the rewards of Gonzi’s weaknesses. His party was endowed by seemingly unlimited funding. And he was the new kid on the block.
At one point, the PL ran two sets of billboard campaigns. The first campaign showed a smiling Muscat on a series of brightly colourful backdrops. The other showed the PN figures who had earned the ire of the general populace in stark black and white. Daphne was included among them, as the PL presented her as part of the PN machine.
The decision to include her was not merely spiteful or convenient. It was strategic.
Placing Daphne in the mix was an example of the kind of reward Muscat could deliver the disgruntled PN politicians she had gone after: Mugliett for incompetence, Pullicino Orlando for hypocrisy, Debono for megalomania, and Dalli for corruption.
It allowed those PN politicians who had fallen from favour to present themselves as victims of the PN party machine. Daphne was habitually lampooned on PL media, called a witch, and described as hatching evil plans to bolster her friends in the PN and destroy their enemies.
The billboard campaign, which hung a journalist alongside politicians, showed how the PL intended to ‘manage’ Daphne.
At the 2013 election Muscat secured the biggest electoral majority in 60 years. The PL had lost to the PN in 2008 by 1,800 votes. In 2013, it won by 36,000 votes.
The PN was on its knees. Its leader announced his resignation. The party would need to rediscover its sense of purpose and would need to face the reality of a financial situation that for any other business would mean bankruptcy.
Daphne had no such distractions. On Monday morning, Joseph Muscat’s first day as prime minister, she got to work on a new mission. Her five-year-old website would become the hub of opposition to the government. She would scrutinise each of their decisions, documenting their every move.
One of those first decisions was to write off a debt of €4.5 million that the operators of a downtown Valletta cafe owed the government in rent. What was effectively a cash grant was authorised directly by the prime minister who intervened in the interests of a party donor.
It would be the first of a long series of scandals that would have rocked any government that did not enjoy Muscat’s majority.
Daphne documented each of these scandals. There would be a new shocker weekly, sometimes several times a week. The new government abandoned established practices in favour of methods of dubious legality.
In its first days in office it went through every civil service department and fired its permanent secretary, replacing them with the party faithful. It launched a campaign to employ ‘persons of trust’ in key positions, effectively transferring the PL’s salary bill to the government by placing favoured staffers on the state payroll. The established civil service recruitment process was bypassed.
It unilaterally changed the terms of lease on government properties rented to the PL so that the party could profit from the properties.
It changed the rules to allow its supporters to gain rapid promotions. For example, PL supporters in the armed forces could jump four ranks in one promotion after the government abolished the minimum number of ranks a single promotion could skip.
It placed every single PL MP who was not in the cabinet on the state payroll, supplementing their parliamentary income with retainers or contracts as government advisers. In some cases, it employed MPs directly as staffers in the prime minister’s office in direct breach of constitutional rules.
The new government fired the heads of regulatory bodies with legal powers to overrule government decisions, appointi
ng in their place party apparatchiks often with no discernible competence or experience in the area.
The police chief was not the only officer to be fired and replaced by a party loyalist. The team at the top of the police force was rapidly replaced by officers chosen for their political allegiance, squeezing out most career officers.
Daphne closely followed each outrageous move, warning against normalisation and desensitisation. She made it clear that a party in government had to be held to objective standards of decency and public propriety, and there could be no excuses for exceptions.
She also documented in detail how the Muscat government’s take-over of institutions was effectively shifting policy-making away from objective rule-setting to a method of overt favouritism for those willing to hop on board the PL train.
In a country the size of Malta, the most valuable currency is land and its development. By 2013, Malta had already started to suffer serious consequences of over-development. To the north of the capital Valletta, the land has sprouted tall concrete edifices. With weak public transport, the build-up of traffic jams has become a way of life.
Critical to good governance is the proper maintenance of local planning laws, to limit building and to defend open, green spaces against predatory developers.
The ’70s and ’80s had seen widespread corrupt practices in the granting of building permits, which could not be issued without the signature of a government minister. It was not unusual for a landowner to consider making a government minister a silent partner in the development project so that the building permit would go through.
When the PN came to power, it was keen to find a way to stop these practices. In 1992, it set up a planning authority to try and implement a fair and balanced process. Unfortunately the general populace was so accustomed to the practice that it could obtain the desired outcome with a backhander that the new authority failed to meet the expectations of the PN supporters who felt that it was now their turn to benefit.
Under pressure to appease landowners, the PN government extended the zones where building could be permitted in 2009, thinking that this would help moderate demand.