It takes a particular kind of political animal to follow the two-hour-long budget speech by the opposition leader, whoever he is. It’s tricky to draw conclusions from Bernard Grech’s first major speech as PN leader. But since when has that stopped pundits?
A hunch: it’s a mistake to assess the speech’s direct impact. The audience would not be the right one. And, in a sense, the speaker would be the wrong one, too.
How many remember Joseph Muscat’s first economic proposals as Labour leader (2008-10)? They were overshadowed by what came later, just as his speaking style improved dramatically.
The Grech we saw on Monday will not be the same one we’ll have in around six months. His delivery won’t sound so homiletic. He’ll have had more time to master his brief and won’t need to read his speech. His 12 pillars, impossible to remember, let alone enthuse over, will be whittled down to five or fewer.
Very likely, he will have moved away from some of his concrete proposals, just as Muscat quietly dropped his living wage proposal after 2010. So I reckon that any drama criticism of his performance or assessment of his specific proposals is irrelevant because premature. What’s relevant is what his speech says about the general direction in which he’s taking the PN.
Labour’s initial reaction suggests it was caught off guard. It said that Grech sounded just like Simon Busuttil. Wrong. There was a major difference.
In the wake of the landslide defeat of 2013, Busuttil was subdued about all things concerning Lawrence Gonzi’s government, including the economic record. Grech has reclaimed it as a badge of pride, repeatedly using the PN’s record as a stick with which to beat Labour’s.
For the last seven years, Labour has been triumphalist in presenting itself as the party of economic competence. Earlier this year, Robert Abela told a Labour conference that Labour was the natural party of government and wealth creation.
Grech went after this boast with a vengeance. He repeatedly accused Labour of incompetence and mediocrity. He made fun of the zombie budget promises ‒ the ones that die forgotten after budget day, only to emerge from the grave as a new promise in the following budget.
It does take nerve to accuse a government of economic incompetence when it has presided over several years of rapid economic growth (even if the statistics show the growth began in 2010, under Gonzi). Does the chutzpah remind you of anyone? It should: Muscat.
As opposition leader, Muscat did something counter-intuitive. He orchestrated a full-frontal, unremitting, rhetorical onslaught on Gonzi, the man whose reputation and competence had single-handedly won the PN a third consecutive term by a whisker. It succeeded – helped in part by spiralling oil prices and the Great Recession but also by the internal contradictions of the PN then.
To go by Monday’s speech, Grech wants to pull off something similar. He ridiculed Muscatonomics – when, until a few months ago, Muscat’s economic competence was not in question. He blamed Abela for messing up the pandemic recovery and painted him as indifferent to regular people’s plight.
Labour has accused Grech of criticising the size of the deficit and challenged him to suggest what initiative or programme he’d cut. In fact, Grech’s proposals would increase government spending considerably. His criticism of the deficit was to say that a lot of the spending was going into propping up deals smacking of corruption and shortchanging the taxpayer.
The previously disoriented patient, babbling in tongues, is on the road to recovery- Ranier Fsadni
If all Grech did was simply criticise the government, he wouldn’t distinguish himself, or the PN, from the various public voices that already are critical. We already have a range of people – from a third party to civil society organisations to the commentariat and Facebook warriors – who do just that. Grech did more.
A lot of our public commentary is as demagogic as its targets. It’s all ‘Us vs Them’, with purity tests to separate the elect from the riff-raff (or the elite or the envious or the hateful or the benighted). Grech’s speech sidestepped all that. He spoke of a Malta that gives everyone a chance of becoming a better version of themselves and congratulated Miriam Dalli on her achievements in the European Parliament.
His naming of the various demographic groups can be criticised: crowd-pleasing, sermonising, etc. But the intent – behind mentioning the elderly, youth, Gozo, pandemic frontliners, even Air Malta pilots – was to earn the right to speak on their behalf.
Unlike the demagogues, he did not just channel popular anger. Rhetorically, Grech tried to present the PN as the party that could heal the anger. He showed an understanding that, at the core of pluralist politics, is empathetic listening, not populism’s anger; aspiration, not victimhood.
Feel free to cringe at some of Grech’s sentimentalist stunts during his speech, like asking the dead for their forgiveness. But assume he’ll eventually polish the stump speech and you’ll see there’s a distinctive PN voice being recovered.
It’s not just that it’s ready to embrace its economic record. Or that it is ready to speak to people’s aspirations. Muffled, in a packed speech, was the claim that Malta – not just politics, but the society – needed radical transformation.
That is the recognisable voice of the PN of old: confident, mobilising, transforming. It cannot be confused with anyone else’s. No one else’s voice can be attributed to it.
Of course, the PN still needs to speak persuasively to a new world. But on Monday we saw that the previously disoriented patient, babbling in tongues, is on the road to recovery.