There is nothing ironic about the Nationalist Party’s debt. It is tragic. But when it comes to the arguments about its ‘ideology’, the irony is threefold.
The first irony is that ideology, when it comes to the PN’s woes, is a red herring. The actual infighting is not over ideology. It’s over fundamental distrust of – and between – leading politicians. Even when the party’s red line on abortion is invoked – as something that Bernard Grech supposedly wants to reverse – the fear is fed by prior distrust.
Take the divisions between politicians in the last two legislatures. On social issues, no MP was more conservative than Claudio Grech. Before someone squeaks, “What about Edwin Vassallo?”, I’ll repeat: second to none.
But when it came to divisions concerning party strategy and the leadership, he had more ground in common with Therese Comodini Cachia, a centrist with a principled sympathy for social liberalism.
Like Vassallo, Clyde Puli served (during Lawrence Gonzi’s governments) as chair of parliament’s social affairs committee. Puli is a centrist who steered his committee in a socially liberal direction (as far as he realistically could at the time, which was less than he wanted). In 2004, Puli and Vassallo had prominent roles on opposite sides of the leadership contest. Yet, in 2017-20, Puli found common ground with Vassallo in the gut-wrenching arguments over strategy and leadership.
There’s no cherry-picking going on here. We could go through the whole parliamentary group with the same results.
The infighting has been so difficult to resolve precisely because it’s not about ideology. On policy differences, convergence and compromise are usually possible. Politicians are used to compromise.
But the MPs found themselves in uncharted waters, relying on personal judgement of situations and people. As reality became difficult to read, appearances were increasingly distrusted. If you fundamentally distrust the person you’re talking to, nothing he or she says can change anything.
It is grimly amusing to see people attribute the splits to divisions between ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’ when all the diatribes are ad hominem.
The personalised nature of the infighting has alienated many supporters. It’s so unlike the big tent party they were used to supporting. Because it’s alienating, it breeds further distrust.
Labour knows this well. Its propaganda is focused on ad hominem arguments, depicting its targets as embodiments of deadly sins like pride, envy and anger, “who will never change”.
It’s a clever line. Even if you believe that Labour has the patent on greed and gluttony, you might still find that kind of corruption is more approachable than the corruption of heart represented by “hate”.
Here’s the second irony. Members of the PN are allowing its political adversary to define them. They accept Labour’s crude caricatures of Nationalist politicians and adopt them in internal argument.
The party that introduced social dialogue has become the party of mutual accusation and recrimination- Ranier Fsadni
The only ideology Labour attributes to the PN is “elitism”. In other times, it would be amusing. Labour is currently the party par excellence of super-salaried apparatchiks and crony capitalism.
People should laugh when Labour blames the PN’s “Establishment” for the exclusion of Mario de Marco and Carm Mifsud Bonnici from the shadow cabinet. Their exclusion was certainly a gross error. But due to the “Establishment”? De Marco and Mifsud Bonnici are as politically established as anyone can be, respectively second- and third-generation senior politicians. Excluding them was an error due to detachment from the PN’s organisational structure, rather than entrenchment in it.
The PN’s current problems stem from many things but hardly elitism. Real elitists do not issue anathemas to everyone but the happy few. Elites understand they need the plebs for hierarchy to make sense. Like Labour today, they disguise their will to rule alone by adopting a rhetoric of inclusivity, familism and co-option.
Instead, the PN is behaving increasingly like a sect emerging from the shell of a disenchanted, demoralised broad church. The struggle to save the party has become defined as a quest for moral salvation. Every compromise is seen as a rotten compromise.
The party that introduced social dialogue has become the party of mutual accusation and recrimination. The party of openness to all comers has become the party suspicious of infiltration, even as its major problem is the haemorrhage of voters, members and councillors.
Here’s the final irony. The party that took Malta into Europe is killing itself by banishing its European sources of identity and Americanising its differences. The ringside spectators aren’t helping, either.
Urging the party to decide whether it’s conservative or liberal is to adopt a contrast based on US politics that make no sense of the PN’s history.
The PN can be called a historically liberal party in the sense that it stands for a liberal democratic system as opposed to colonialism, autocracy, or thug rule.
Within such a liberal system, successive PN leaders were clear in defining themselves as centrists. Under Eddie Fenech Adami, the PN was defined as a centrist party “that looks (with sympathy) towards the left”.
When Gonzi became leader in 2004, he was asked, on Xarabank, the TV show, whether he accepted the label ‘social democrat’. He hesitated, then rejected it. When he was asked if he considered himself a conservative, his answer came fast: “No!”
The party published a book-length statement about its basic orientation in 1986, Fehmiet Bażiċi. It combines liberalism’s dispersal of power and embrace of modernity with conservatism’s concern with social bonds. Half the book is concerned with emancipation from traditional shackles. The second half explores how civic associations can participate in decision-making.
That book was the result of a long process of dialogue within the party structures, bottom-up and top-down. The fact that path was taken was an ideological statement in itself. It was based on trust and generated it.
It’s not too late to embark on that path once more. But it soon will be.