As we head towards another general election, the surveys carried out so far reflect one thing: the Labour Party will win again and it will probably sweep back into power with another major landslide.
For a party embroiled in the biggest scandals of a generation and that has taken nepotism to stratospheric levels, that is quite a feat.
Labour cannot take all the credit, though. If it is so far ahead, it is because the Nationalist Party is failing to inspire.
Adrian Delia’s time as leader was characterised with in-fighting and a thrashing at the polls before he was unseated by his own.
Bernard Grech has managed to stop the party from imploding and kept two warring factions away from each others’ throats, but he is clearly failing to make inroads, heading to an election which will likely lead to another PN leadership challenge.
It would be unfair to blame the polling gap entirely on a new leader whose party has been bleeding since 2008. Has Grech had enough time? Certainly not, but neither did Emanuel Macron, who built a party from scratch and went on to win the French presidency. But Malta is not France, and partisan blind faith is more endemic on the island.
Yet, seven months into Grech’s leadership, the PN appears to be meandering without quite knowing what it wants to be.
It is a party that appears to be inherently afraid of change and perennially stuck in a situation of compromise that ultimately pleases nobody. In this, it could perhaps look to pre-2013 Joseph Muscat for some ideas: as opposition leader, Muscat was not afraid of making bold statements or going against his party’s historic positions. The former prime minister’s failings verge on the criminal, but his campaigning as an opposition leader was masterful.
Grech, by contrast, continues to wade in a swamp of indecision. The PN speaks about embracing the environment but then tiptoed around the disgraceful Miżieb land grab. Grech speaks about the need to rescue migrants and then falls for dog-whistle rhetoric about protecting the country’s ‘security’, all in the same sentence.
Rather than seize an opportunity to take the lead on issues like the environment and planning and reinvent itself as the green-friendly alternative to Labour’s concrete mania, the party continues to try to appease hunting and developers’ lobbies.
Drawing up strategies and reports and setting up sub-committees gives the impression a lot is happening behind the scenes. Making convincing statements in public can be even more effective.
The very public altercation between Adrian Delia and Jason Azzopardi in the past days again put Grech in an impossible situation. He convened a meeting of the party’s executive committee, then aborted it after the two MPs issued a statement riddled with evident half-truths which treated the electorate like fools. Grech said the feud was now “resolved”.
Nobody believes that, and in saying so Grech dealt his own party a blow. If the PN cannot be truthful about something as straightforward as a social media spat, how can it be trusted with far more important matters?
Meanwhile, the PN is seeking to renew itself by trying to weed out old faces and entice younger and fresh candidates to contest the next general election.
The party is right to be looking for new candidates, but youth in and of itself will not cut it. What the party needs is to rid itself of the cobwebbed minds which have morphed the party into a reactionary one. It should also stop trying to entice candidates with baggage.
Grech – a political outsider who took 100 days to announce a shadow cabinet – faces a daunting task as he prepares to lead the PN to an election. Whether he is up to it remains to be seen. It is a job as unenviable as they come.