There’s no shortage of public advice for the Nationalist Party these days. The problem is that much of it ignores history or else averts its gaze from the immediate challenges of the present and near future.
What guarantees does my coming prescription have? None. However, it’s based on assumptions that enabled this column to predict, in June 2008, Joseph Muscat’s winning strategy for 2013, including the key PN demographic he’d go for.
After the PN’s debacle in 2013, while everyone was still aghast at how the PN had hit rock bottom, this column predicted that it would sink further. In 2017, it predicted Adrian Delia would win the leadership election.
You don’t have to be Nostradamus. You just need to focus on what’s already sprouting in the present, be familiar with patterns of aspiration, culture and history and avoid wishful thinking.
In that spirit, let’s look at the two unalterable facts faced by the PN today. First, there is no leadership alternative to Bernard Grech at present. Second, the year of the European Parliament elections, 2024, will be the year that decides Grech’s leadership.
There is no point in Grech’s internal critics decrying the first fact. Not only are there no challengers in the upcoming leadership election. There are no ready, potential leaders available.
No such leader will be apparent until the PN has taken a good stocktaking of itself. That will involve at least a year-long process of two-way dialogue with all active party members and wider society.
Such a dialogue is essential if the PN is to recover its social and emotional intelligence. Malta is changing profoundly even in those areas where it’s conventional to see resistance to change.
For example, it’s not just students who travel more and farther; young hunters routinely travel to other continents for the sake of their hobby. Feminism isn’t reaching women only at work or in politics; women can now be found in traditional male preserves like fireworks factories.
You cannot begin to formulate public policies without having a good idea of what different voices say, especially about their private troubles, without being caricaturised by their critics.
But neither are you a worthy party of government if you cannot formulate a national programme that addresses those private concerns while transcending clientelism.
The leader, or leaders, that emerge will be those figures capable of articulating a national programme as a persuasive narrative.
It could end up being Grech himself. The process – which plays to his ability for synthesis of differing viewpoints – could well improve his standing. But it might instead point to a more credible future leader.
It’s pointless for Grech’s supporters to decry those who point out the obvious. If the PN doesn’t get a good result in the EP elections of 2024, he’ll be a lame duck in 2027. His leadership will be in perpetual question and prevent support for the PN from gathering momentum.
These two unalterable facts are at once harsh and good news for the PN. They’re harsh because, taken together, they’re unpalatable to most of the infighting protagonists. Everyone is going to have to discipline themselves and change if the organised, structured dialogue is to succeed.
They’re good news because, first, the only way forward suits everyone. It comes at no one’s expense. It’s in the interest of both Grech and his internal critics.
If there’s an ideological component in the current political landscape, it’s one the entire PN can share- Ranier Fsadni
Second, on this analysis, ideological differences are not the PN’s basic problem. To frame the party’s disagreements in terms of conservatives versus liberals misses the point and can’t explain what’s happened in the last nine years of opposition.
The PN in its heyday was always a centrist party, accommodating voters from its right and from its left. Under Giorgio Borg Olivier, the aspiration was to be a British-style moderate liberal party. Under Eddie Fenech Adami, it was to be a continental Christian Democrat party, which has nothing to do with US-style Christian social conservatism.
To describe the PN’s current malaise as somehow ideological is, in one sense, to pay it the compliment that its senior politicians have an articulate vision of what a centrist vision should look like in the 21st century. For the most part, they don’t, which is why too many of them sound as though it’s still 2008.
The splits have not been ideological. Adrian Delia’s internal critics do not all agree on, say, LGBTIQ rights – anyone who followed the PN’s internal debates between 2013-2017 would know that.
The splits have rather been on strategic choices. Post-2013, the PN lost its collective self-confidence when it came to reading society; post-2017, it lost its collective confidence in its leaders, all the ones it’s had since 2013.
And here’s some more good news. If there’s an ideological component in the current political landscape, it’s one the entire PN can share.
The current electoral competition is not between conservatism and “progressivism”. It’s between the patrimonialism practised by Labour – the blurring of public and private interests by politicians who behave like arrogant masters not servants – and a politics that stands for the decentralisation of power and the democratisation of the economy in the digital age.
There is a wide social alliance – from the private sector to civil society, from the honest centre-left to the centre-right – ready to support a political platform based on democratic empowerment. It’s ground that the PN can occupy while being true to its authentic historic identity as the party of Independence and EU membership.
The PN just needs to decide if it really wants it.