The Nationalist Party’s problems of mismanagement, ill-discipline and hubris began soon after Lawrence Gonzi’s slim victory in 2008 when Richard Cachia Caruana left Castille for Brussels to serve Malta as its Permanent Representative to the European Union. He brought to this task the full concentration of his organisational skills, a detailed mastery of his brief and an adamant refusal to accept less than the best deal possible for Malta.
But with hindsight, one can also trace the party’s decline – its mishandling of the divorce referendum, the secret pay rise for ministers, the increasingly vocal disunity among disaffected backbenchers, the Arriva fiasco, and the corruption scandal of ‘Oilgate’ – to the vacuum created when Caruana Cachia left and the consequent loss of grip which he had been able to exercise when he was the prime minister’s chief of staff in Castille. His inevitable focus on Brussels left Gonzi’s government domestically rudderless.
The party’s travails were compounded when, on Gonzi’s resignation after its trouncing at the 2013 general election, it selected the wrong leader to succeed him.
I believed then – and do so more strongly today – that we would be looking at a different PN picture if Mario de Marco had inherited the crown. The last decade has led to a fracturing of the party. No amount of hand-wringing – or the benefits of hindsight about what might have been – will restore it.
The past is of use to us as the eve of tomorrow. As the Nationalist Party meets in three days’ time to consider a vote of confidence in their beleaguered leader, I believe that, whatever the outcome of the vote, it will not change the hand PN has been dealt by the botched last decade.
I was therefore interested to read Cachia Caruana’s clear-minded assessment in his interview with this newspaper of July 16 on the state of the party and the way ahead if it is to save itself from extinction.
All Louis Galea’s efforts to revitalise the party’s organisation and debt-ridden finances will not succeed…unless PN stands unified, not divided
He concentrated on four key points. First, reform the system for choosing the leader, with the future focus on ensuring the selection process is designed to choose somebody who is “electable by a majority of the national electorate, not [simply] the party electorate”.
Second, the job of PN must be to forge a majority within the country around a set of governing principles and policies that the electorate recognises as being in its interests.
Third, the ‘party brand’ depends crucially on the role of the leader. It is the leader’s job to create a united party from many diverse elements. “Only united parties win” elections.
Fourth, a political party exists to win elections. PN must show that it is committed to reform.
About 10 months ago, I advocated that Adrian Delia should reach out to those party elders – now retired from active politics, but still fiercely loyal to the PN they had shaped into an election-winning machine – to help him (or the next leader if Saturday’s vote of confidence goes against Delia) to build bridges with those who are disaffected but still yearning for a change of course in Maltese politics.
I was therefore delighted to learn that Louis Galea, who played such a significant role in revitalising the party in the decade up to 1987, had agreed to lead a reform programme. He must do this against the background that the Nationalist Party has become a demoralised and fractious party – ranging from multiple activist groups too many to count to pro-Busuttil groupies or MEPs beating a different drum.
The party is even more factionally divided now than that which brought down Gonzi in 2013.
The reforms must lead to new thinking which, as Cachia Caruana put it, places winning elections front and centre: its raison d’etre. These must lead to the development of policies which not only inspire and motivate those activists already committed to the party but also the increasing number of thinking “switchers”. They must rediscover what PN offers that is different. For PN to succeed, the reforms must rebuild the party brick by brick.
A reinvigorated AZAD (the party think-tank) should focus on creating a new vision for PN, one which inspires an agenda that chimes with what the country wants for its political and economic future. It should address the kind of legacy PN wants our children and grandchildren to inherit in a concerted attempt to develop new policies to tackle the four major challenges which will face Malta in the next 20 years.
These challenges are, one: the demographic deficit and dependence on foreign workers to sustain Malta’s economic model. Two: the island’s deteriorating urban quality of life and environment.
Three: the increasing gap between haves and have-nots in society. Four: the looming threat to this tiny island-state of accelerating climate change.
In conditions of such disarray and demoralisation, the major task of the reform process is to re-invent and re-invigorate the party and win back the trust not just of its core supporters but of the country.
Leadership is key. The PN leader’s party-political skills must be paramount. He must be capable of inspiring PN by re-instilling discipline and the desire for power. He must select and motivate a more dynamic parliamentary front bench of shadow ministers.
He must ensure that the party machine is there to support him organisationally in opposing the government.
The beginning of political leadership is a battle for the hearts and minds of men and women. In the final analysis, all Galea’s efforts to revitalise the party’s organisation and debt-ridden finances will not succeed in changing its current abject situation unless PN stands unified, not divided. The PN leader must find ways of healing the wounds that have fractured the party not only during the last two years, but in the last decade.
PN is at a crossroads between survival and irrelevance. If the party’s supporters continue to fight one another they will be out of office for years to come and could split irrevocably. Alone, the party leader – whoever he or she might be – will surely fail. With a reunited party behind him – and the structural reforms that Galea will surely propose – he might succeed.