After the Nationalist Party has positioned itself in favour of constitutional protections to the environment and ecosystems, with the Labour Party opposing this move, environmental NGOs were aligned with the Nationalist Party’s proposals marking a very significant turnaround in Maltese politics.
This political development is unusual because it mirrors how Joseph Muscat had positioned the Nationalist Party toward the LGBT community. This doesn’t mean that there is an open alliance between the Nationalist Party and the environmentalist movement, however the Nationalist Party has positioned itself closer to the environmental movement in terms of policy with the Labour government being clearly on the opposing side of the environmentalist movement.
Labour has significantly regressed in its planning and environmental policies and laws, and it has also backslid on animal-welfare legislation.
On the free-press, Labour went when from abolishing censorship in the arts and also criminal-libel to proposing censorship over individual “private matters” and its MPs calling for increased civil damages in libel cases. Today’s free speech advocates are in the PN, while Labour MPs constantly attack the free press.
Under Prime Minister Robert Abela, the Labour Party has become a conservative party. Now it has become even more conservative and populist than the Nationalist Party itself, while the Nationalist Party embraces environmental protection as a national interest.
The Labour Party is only left with a theatre of propaganda wherein public funds are splashed indiscriminately to promote its progressive politics, which next to its environmental destruction, sound like theatrical gimmicks. Such as when a Junior Minister sets up a press conference and invites the press to announce that the government will be distributing free period products for girls in schools: good initiative but it’s the fact that these initiatives need be loudly announced from a pulpit of virtuousness that shows how Labour has nothing left to give. Even on abortion, the government has back-tracked significantly and seems to have given up on combating PN on this issue.
Note, that this political shifting is significant and irreversible if we are to apply the “cyclical history” of Maltese politics: if it’s cyclical at all. The Labour Party’s economic mission had been exhausted in 1979 and it effectively became and remained the conservative party of the past for many years. The Nationalist Party had swept the youth away with the goal of Malta becoming a member of the European Union: a vision that in that time was progressive, modern and in the national interest. The same political trends are remerging today in different ways.
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