So, those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first drive mad – but how? By making them believe that what they’re concentrating on is far more important than it really is. Psychologists call this the focusing illusion.
And, as the Nationalist Party approaches the decisive weekend of the leadership election, we can see illusions gripping opponents.
Some believe the vote is a choice between Christian Democrats and the ‘Liberals’ who oppose Delia. For good measure they throw in the fortune cookie observation that the PN suffered its greatest electoral loss when it ran as a liberal party.
It’s just not true. Delia’s opponents range from the centre-right to centre-left, with many convinced Christian Democrats among them.
As for the 2017 general election, if its positions on civil liberties caused the PN’s greatest loss, then Labour’s almost identical liberal positions caused its massive victory. Of course, it was neither one.
Another illusion: that the leadership election is about ‘justice for Daphne’. An important cause, but too narrow to define the future of a political party.
It’s not about ‘finishing what we started’, either. Politicians have a vital role in anti-corruption campaigns, but their principal task is to champion a persuasive programme for government.
We need to go back to the immediate aftermath of the 2017 general election to see what this leadership election is really about.
In 2013, the landslide defeat left Nationalist supporters stunned but unsurprised. They lost confidence in their ability to read Maltese society. Following Panamagate, their confidence returned. Then came the 2017 result.
This time, the surprise left them gasping for air. What about Panama? And Egrant? Did no one care?
Many PN voters misread the result to mean that the electorate was wholly cynical and transactional. This interpretation made no sense of a quarter-century of PN victories, but no matter.
A majority of party members decided that the PN needed a leader in the mould of Muscat. Someone who could come across as streetwise and schmooze the electorate. If he came across as a bit of a slippery rascal, that didn’t matter. It obviously hadn’t harmed Muscat.
Delia won the leadership election on the wager that he could go toe to toe with Muscat in a society where a whiff of impropriety didn’t matter. That was his selling point.
It was a multiple misjudgement. The brand competition between the PN and Labour is not symmetrical. What works for a Labour leader doesn’t work for his counterpart.
Delia was never in a position to preach a prosperity gospel when he couldn’t manage his own money- Ranier Fsadni
Anyway, Delia was not cut in Muscat’s mould. The latter’s persona is built on his disciplined, calculating iciness; the rare footage that shows his mask slipping reveals cold, laser-focused anger. Delia’s public persona is of extroverted indiscipline; his barking, blazing anger is part of his political personality, not something we accidentally glimpse.
Nothing captures the difference more than the money questions that hang over each. Muscat seems to have much more money than we believe he should have. Where did it come from? Delia, on the contrary, has much less. Where did it go?
It was another serious mistake to believe that Muscat’s success was due simply to electoral cynicism. He did practise patronage on a shameless scale. But it was part of a prosperity gospel. He appealed to people’s higher motives and aspirations even as he tickled their lower instincts.
Not everyone who voted for him joined the faithful in affirming, “I believe in Joseph because Joseph believes in me”. But most believed that he had the keys to the laws of wealth creation. Magical thinking drove the belief that Malta’s exceptionalism and Muscat’s cunning could free the country of the political-economic constraints that bind the rest of Europe.
Obviously, Delia was never in a position to preach a prosperity gospel when he couldn’t manage his own money.
Finally, that prosperity gospel is today debunked. Muscat is disgraced, and his successor is reduced to selling out Maltese citizens, and swallowing a SOFA with the US, in the hope he can avoid the economic debacle of having Malta greylisted by Moneyval.
We can now see the underbelly of Muscatonomics. It’s not just protectionism for cronies. It’s the imposition of a market morality for everyone else – felt in the consequences of mass labour importation on rents, construction, public safety, the character of neighbourhoods and schools, and much else.
So what an opposition party needs, today, is a leader who can make the case for inclusive citizenship rooted in community, public goods and civic values, without veering into bigotry.
Delia hasn’t been able to articulate it. Instead of articulating a vision of communitarian social justice, he has resorted to crude nationalism. Instead of seeing social innovation as the key to both prosperity and a thriving public sphere, he insists on ‘preserving a Maltese way of life’ – as though there’s just one, and as though ways of life can stand still.
He was elected to trade blows, schmoozes and favours. He has no affinity for what’s needed today. All he could write, in this week’s Sunday Times op-ed, were platitudes of such timelessness that they could have been written in his youth.
So this is the choice before the PN. It is not just about the leader and his opponents. It’s about what happens after that – the relationship the PN wants to build with the electorate.
Does it maintain Delia’s siege mentality and rhetoric of victimhood, which he cannot escape even if the rest of the PN follows him? Or does the PN begin to transform itself into the socially intelligent organisation it was until around 15 years ago?
The right choice won’t spare the PN any pain. Those whom the devil wants to torment, he first makes sane.