Mintoff's Legacy

 

As Fausto has pointed out, yesterday was former Prime Minister Dom Mintoff's 90th birthday. As the man is still alive, it may be too early to say anything definitive about his political legacy. However, I will attempt a very short and rough first draft.

What is certain is that not much of what Mintoff actually did while in power remains. He did greatly beef up the welfare state (at immense economic cost). That will remain, although not in the form that he envisaged it. His economic legacy is more dubious. He had an extremely shaky understanding of economics and this was mostly based on ideas that even his Fabian mentors were in the process of rejecting when he was implementing them in Malta. His foreign policy has likewise been rejected even by his own party. As in economics, he misread the signs of the times and created policies that could not survive in the long term. Neutrality is still there but is now little more than a legal obstacle to Malta's participation in the CFSP. The dream of Malta as a broker between East and West faded a long time ago.

Mintoff may ironically be remembered as the guardian angel of the Nationalist Party and the father of the island's present two-party system. He 'inherited' from Sir Paul Boffa a Labour Party that enjoyed the support of around 60% of the electorate, more than three times that of its closest challenger, the discredited PN. With such support the Labour Party could have governed the island for two or three decades before experiencing any serious challenge. It might even have established a Scandinavian-style situation where the centre-right is almost permanently excluded from government. Thanks mainly to Mintoff, this did not come about. Two battles with the Catholic Church and two equally bitter internal splits during Mintoff's early years meant that the party's support declined dramatically and consistently while that of its closest (but still very distant) challenger grew. By 1971, when Mintoff finally took power for an extended period, the Nationalist Party had virtually caught up with its rival, and overtook it a few years into Mintoff's turbulent premiership, enjoying a 'natural majority' for the remainder of the century and beyond. When Mintoff formally retired as Prime Minister, he appointed as his successor an unelectable politician (who was even more extremist than himself) and when the Labour Party finally returned narrowly to power in 1996, he brought this government down, ending his career as he had begun it and allowing the Nationalists to govern for another decade, during which Malta finally became a member of what he had once called 'the Europe of Cain'.

As with many other extremists before and since, his main legacy may have been to have unwittingly contributed (and in no small way) to the realization of his adversaries' long-term vision at the expense of his own. Surely this is a lesson that should not be lost on those active in the political scene today, particularly those on the two extremes of the political spectrum.