Of all the challenges facing any leader of the opposition, the most important and trickiest is to avoid being disliked instantly by the voters. This matters because any political leader has only a few months in which to make a broadly positive public impression.
Measured by this criterion, Nationalist Party leader Adrian Delia has struggled for almost three years, ever since his election was roundly criticised by Daphne Caruana Galizia and a major faction within the Nationalist Party duly deserted him.
Since then, it has been downhill all the way for the PN as it struggled to make inroads into the Labour Party’s overwhelming lead in the polls.
The last few weeks have witnessed a perceptible change in mood within the Nationalist Party. First, revelations in the compilation of evidence against murder suspect Yorgen Fenech, the alleged mastermind behind Caruana Galizia’s assassination in 2017, have highlighted the corruption that reached the highest levels of Joseph Muscat’s government and given party members a chance to bask in the satisfying glow of schadenfreude.
Second, the launch of a wide-ranging policy review under 14 working groups is the first attempt in decades to fundamentally re-energise the PN’s thinking.
Third, a successful extraordinary general council meeting last week made a raft of changes to the party’s statute that appear to have succeeded in bringing together a number of different wings of the PN, as well as several critics of Delia himself.
All these events have enhanced the PN’s position and party morale. They are essentially the outcome of some redoubtable work by former party stalwart Louis Galea over the past 12 months in the aftermath of the PN’s historic double drubbing in the European and local council elections. They might even be seen as the first tentative steps to re-establish some vestige of PN credibility.
But there was an elephant in the room at that council meeting. While the launch of a policy review and changes to the statute are of interest to the paid-up party membership, they count for little if the leader does not enjoy the unquestioned support of all his parliamentary colleagues and party faithful. Worse, opinion polls have repeatedly shown only a minority of the electorate trust Delia’s leadership. The grim reality is that he is unelectable.
The grim reality is that he is unelectable
Despite the disgraceful scandals that have shamed the country, many believe another Labour victory at the next general election is a foregone conclusion.
Contributing to this is the fact that the PN is led by a largely unpopular figure who has left many traditional Nationalist supporters feel politically orphaned. They feel he carries too much baggage, even pre-dating his political career.
In the final analysis, all the efforts – for which Delia should rightly be credited – to reform the party’s organisation and statute and to develop future policies to govern this country if elected, will be almost irrelevant.
Leadership is key. One of the roles of a leader is to be a vote-winning asset for his party. Despite his evident efforts to reach out, Delia remains a liability. Time is pressing. A consistently abysmal showing in the polls should make any leader who puts party first seriously consider his position. Today’s story exposing further his links to Yorgen Fenech will alienate a further chunk of PN supporters.
Delia’s success at winning a vote of confidence last year should not continue being used as an excuse to lead the party towards another inevitable electoral drubbing.