Dr Mark M. Scerri

(article reproduced from MaltaToday 25 May 2026, p.11)

“Finché la barca va, lasciala andare…” as long as the boat’s afloat, let her sail, is the chorus of a catchy Italian hit from the late 1960s. The core message of the song is to accept the status quo for as long as things are going well. It sounds harmless, but politically, it explains everything that is going wrong.

It captures the logic that has come to dominate Maltese politics: do not rock the boat. Preserve stability. Manage what exists. Above all, avoid change, even when the system itself is producing the problems people are concerned about.This is not stability. It is stagnation.

We have now reached such a point. The Labour Party has consolidated its position as the default party of government. The Nationalist Party, rather than offering a clear alternative, is increasingly competing on the same terrain. The result is not political competition, but political convergence. Politics becomes a marketplace. Voters are treated as consumers, offered incentives, rebates, and marginal improvements. The language of ideology disappears, replaced by the language of management.

The question is no longer what kind of society we want. It is who can run the current one more efficiently. This logic runs through almost every major issue.

Take taxation. Both major parties present it as a burden to be reduced, not as a tool to redistribute wealth or reshape society. The possibility of challenging inequality through fiscal policy is quietly removed from the agenda. What remains is calibration—small adjustments that leave the underlying structure untouched.

The same applies to work and family life. The pressures are acknowledged, but their causes are not. Flexible working arrangements are proposed, while the organisation of work itself remains unquestioned. The 40-hour week, designed for a different era, continues to dictate everyday life. Time scarcity is not an inconvenience.It is a structural outcome. It reflects a system that extracts as much labour as possible while returning as little autonomy as necessary. Addressing it requires more than marginal flexibility. It requires a redistribution of time itself, through shorter working weeks and a meaningful right to disconnect. Only then can people exercise real control over their lives.

The same unwillingness to confront structure is visible in economic policy. Malta’s minimum wage does not allow for a dignified life. This is not a policy failure. It is design. Yet neither of the major parties proposes a living wage, let alone more transformative measures such as universal basic income. These are not technical omissions. They are political decisions, decisions not to redistribute power, not to challenge existing economic hierarchies, not to disturb the model.

Even where the language shifts, the substance often does not. Labour’s “wellbeing” framework gestures towards a broader understanding of quality of life. But without addressing income, time, housing, and environmental degradation at their roots, it risks becoming a technocratic exercise. Wellbeing cannot be measured into existence.

Environmental policy reveals the same limits, more starkly still. Across party manifestos, degradation is treated as something to be managed, through targets, indicators, and planning adjustments. But overdevelopment is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of the model. This is not a planning failure. It is a political economy.

A system built on continuous growth, speculative investment, and short-term returns will inevitably erode land, environment, and public space. To address this requires more than better rules. It requires confronting the interests that benefit from this model and rebalancing power away from speculative capital and towards communities. It means limiting large-scale development, revising land-use frameworks, strengthening environmental rights, and fundamentally rethinking urban life.

The same structural logic underpins the debate on population. Malta’s rapid population growth, driven in large part by an increase in third-country nationals, is widely recognised as a source of pressure. Yet the dominant response is to treat it as a problem of control: manage integration, introduce quotas, improve administration. This is a misdiagnosis. Population growth is not an independent variable. It is the outcome of an economic model that depends on continuous expansion and a steady supply of low-cost labour. The influx of workers is not incidental it is required. A system built on low wages and precarious work cannot function without it. Momentum comes closer to recognising this by linking population growth to labour market dynamics. But even here, the focus remains on regulating exploitation rather than questioning the model that produces it.

Across taxation, work, the environment, and population, the pattern is unmistakable. The central problems facing Maltese society are treated as technical challenges to be managed, rather than as political questions to be contested. Policy becomes administration. Politics becomes managerialism.

We are not facing a series of disconnected crises. We are facing the consequences of a single model: one that treats growth as an end in itself, labour as a cost to be minimised, and land as a commodity to be exploited. These are not isolated failures.
They are predictable outcomes. As long as this model remains intact, policy will continue to treat symptoms while reproducing their causes.

What is required, therefore, is not better management, but a rupture. A rupture that reasserts politics over technocracy. A rupture that recognises conflict as inherent, not something to be smoothed over. A rupture that challenges the dominance of capital over social need, and reorganises economic life around principles of justice, sustainability, and democratic control.

Of the manifestos currently on offer, only that of ADPD begins to move in this direction. Its emphasis on ecological limits, social justice, and the redistribution of power signals a willingness to confront the model itself, rather than merely manage its outcomes. This does not make it perfect. But it does make it fundamentally different.

For that reason, and because the alternative is the continued management of a failing system, I will be voting for ADPD.

https://nebuchadnezzartheneb.substack.com/p/from-politics-to-management-why-malta