Roamer's Column

On April 6 I wrote, among other things: "There is a tide in the affairs of countries that taken at the flood leads on to fortune". And: "At the start of the 21st century we are on the verge of our most critical appointment with destiny. We have arrived at a long-awaited future planned by Dr Fenech Adami's government, a future firmly locked into a reality reached through intensive and detailed negotiations between Malta and the EU".

And: "Our rendezvous with history is on April 16 in Athens. There, in next year's Olympic city, in the country that gave the world wayward gods and goddesses, Mount Olympus and lest we forget, direct democracy, referenda and all," the Maltese prime minister will formally enter, on our behalf, our common home.

And: "So, next Saturday (April 12) has become the most important date in the social, economic and political history of these islands since September, 1964, a defining moment, a last chance to confirm the pro-EU referendum vote of March 8 and to redress the insult heaped upon the majority of the electorate by Dr Sant".

Marvellously, we took that tide at the flood, kept our appointment with destiny, our rendezvous with history, recognised that defining moment and repaired that final indignity. Last Wednesday, 13 years after Malta set out on its journey to membership, in the wake of a referendum and on the coat-tails of a general election, with the Acropolis looking on, we arrived. The Ode to Joy became our second anthem.

What a personal triumph all this has been for Dr Fenech Adami, the politician who has achieved the most 'mosts' in Malta's political history: the man who defeated most political leaders opposed to the Nationalist Party - Dom Mintoff, once thought invincible, irremovable and irreplaceable; Dr Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, in 1987 and 1992, Dr Alfred Sant, in September 1998, in a referendum on March 8 and in the general election on April 12. He has collected the most personal votes cast in favour of any political leader.

Co-opted as a member of Parliament in 1969, Leader of the Opposition to Mr Mintoff in 1977, he spent 11 hard years confronting violence head on, a part of that violence institutionalised. Challenged to apologise for the latter during the election campaign, the worst that Dr Sant could say he said. Agents provocateurs were responsible for the violent situation that developed in those filthy days.

We should not forget just what Dr Fenech Adami's achievement has been. In 1987 he inherited a country on its last infrastructural legs: an airport that was a dump; a coal-fuelled power station that could not cope; a telephone system strung together by wires called Strowger; a financial sector limited to banking, no financial services in sight; a tourism sector on the way to mummification; a foreign policy devoid of substance or vision: a commercial environment that had plumbed the depths and which even precluded foreign chocolate and toothpaste from entering the island; a cultural habitat that was almost uninhabited; an educational system that looked with disfavour upon computers because these would lose people their jobs; a system of importation suffocated by hundreds of restrictions; a vastly overmanned dockyard and shipyard managed and operating at a level of great incompetence; and, the final contribution of the socialist prime minister of the day, the recruitment into government or parastatal service of 8,000 unemployed persons (for an additional government expenditure of Lm24 million a year and growing, as wages increased), regardless of their ability or inability to work in these corporations and services. The weakened institutions, the civil service and the police force in particular, were something else again.

The much derided 'village lawyer', Dr Fenech Adami, and his government changed all this within 16 years. Malta is what it is today thanks to this man and his unshakable belief in the ability of the Maltese people to deliver, to organise, to create - even if this ability had its own warts. He has been criticised for not being a cosmopolitan, for being insular, unlike his opponent, who was deified as the quintessential European. So Maltese politics had to experience the final paradox: the embedded, local provincial versus the descendant of the Enlightenment and the provincial leading Malta into Europe, the cosmopolitan European opting for Malta to remain insular. Eat your heart out, Mario.

The New Spring

When Dr Fenech Adami, buoyed by the prize awaiting him on April 12, introduced the concept of a New Spring, the phrase lifted the election campaign from the banal to the distinctive, the pedestrian to the stimulating and the platitudinous to the unique. I was reminded of another Spring.

One hundred and fifty-one years ago, when Cardinal Newman, a recent convert to the Catholic Church when it was regarded in England as a pariah church, a disloyal sect, a contemptible collection of papists, a corpse, preached his famous sermon, "The Second Spring". In it he called upon the Mother of God to "go forth in thy strength into that north country, which was thine own, and take possession of the land which knows thee not... O Mary, my hope... fulfil to us the promise of this Spring."

What about our New Spring, then? Well, there was general agreement, last Wednesday, that the day in Malta promised anything but that; nor was Maundy Thursday redolent with the sights and sounds of spring. But eastwards, look! The Acropolis was in bright sunshine and Dr Fenech Adami signed the accession treaty after delivering a measured, dignified speech to scores of prime ministers, foreign ministers and presidents gathered there to confirm the enlargement of Europe from 15 to 25 countries. The seat we had dreadful premonitions would be empty was occupied. Malta's new future began. The prime minister reached the apex of his career.

Now that the celebrations are over, his message will be simple and clear. There is work to be done, lots of it, and it is time to get down to things. Becoming members of the European Union is not a panacea for doing nothing, waiting for manna from Brussels, but for redoubling our input and our output, sharpening our initiative, summoning up our creativity and exercising a sense of solidarity with one another. Society, the State and all its institutions have to recognise now, more than ever before, that raising our standards is our responsibility. The road map is ours even if the sign-posts have been set by the EU with Malta's agreement.

We know our weak points, our administrative fault-lines and our deficiencies in operational procedures. We witness daily a lack of middle management. Each ministry has a battle to fight and win against inefficiency. New ministers and their parliamentary secretaries have to lead the way with every ounce of energy in their minds and bodies. Re-election in 2008 depends on it and anyway that is why they have been elected: to serve.

A word of warning while all is bright and fun and the sense of relief palpable. This parliament has a mere five years to run. 2008 will be with us before we can say 2008. Whatever the state of the Opposition at the moment, those who hold a portfolio will sink the governing party if they do not recognise the scale of their many and varied responsibilities. The electorate has given you its confidence. It would be shameful if you treated that confidence shabbily or with too much laidback familiarity. You made a pact with the electorate. Keep it.

Needed: a Paul Boffa

What to be done? How did Labour get itself into so unelectable a position?

My belief is that after Dr Sant's aborted 22-month government in 1996, he decided that the failure and disintegration of his attempt to re-create the party in a New image provided ample evidence that a more than partial return to the Old had become necessary. Why the failure, though?

My conviction is, that having won his famous victory in 1996, and it was a notable success, he proceeded to lose too swiftly the vital middle ground he had captured. He lacked the maturity to build upon an indispensable swathe of the electorate that we now know is perfectly able and willing to unseat a government at will.

He never quite shed the ingrained mentality that Mr Mintoff embedded in the party's psyche, namely, that decisions taken by the leader are sacrosanct, hallowed, regardless of whether their inviolability was based on fact, principle, or fiction. Unlike Mr Mintoff, he surrounded himself with a coterie that was to wield far too much power for the party's good.

Back in Opposition, Dr Sant made fatal errors of judgment. He publicly declared the new government "illegitimate" and passed this on to bemused chancelleries who knew a majority government when they saw one. He came out with his gwerra, gwerra, gwerra call against the Nationalist Party. New Labour was unceremoniously buried. From its ashes rose an Opposition party that lost its bearings, not least over Malta's entry into the European Union. Here was another stupendous lack of judgment. It was to lead, inexorably, to the party's defeat in the referendum and another serious reverse at the general elections.

His decision to stand down was inevitable; as unavoidable should be a similar resolution on the part of the party's secretary general, Jimmy Magro, and its president, Manwel Cuschieri. To blame Labour's electoral defeat, as Mr Magro did, on journalists "who had the Nationalist Party's political agenda" was not merely to miss the point. It implied that the party had not recognised the need to search into its soul to seek political redemption. Still, what is to be done?

Well, the first thing is for the Labour Party to take a good look at itself and decide who is best placed to lead it. Dr George Vella, who refused the mantle of leadership when it was thrust upon him by Dr Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, probably has no stomach for the fight. Dr Joe Brincat, the third of the leadership tripod, must surely be a non-starter. They are, in any case, deep into the defeat suffered on April 12. Alfred Mifsud, who failed to be elected, can no more declare himself a contender than I can. Leo Brincat, a bit of a lightweight himself, does not stand much of a chance. Where then, the new horses?

Dr John Attard Montalto and Dr Josè Herrera were swift in staking a claim for the leadership. Whether this celerity so soon after their leader's departure will be regarded as irreverent by some remains to be seen. They must have concluded that here was a case of who dares, wins. The former entertains no doubt that the entire leadership needs to be changed. The latter was more circumspect.

Evarist Bartolo will no doubt be making his own calculations as to his future. I cannot see him sitting idly by when a significant prize awaits the winner. Dr Angelo Farrugia is keeping his powder dry; as is Karmenu Vella, who may well be the choice at the end of the post-mortem. Dr George Abela and Lino Spiteri, who both found Dr Sant too much to take, in 1997, may be tempted, of course. The trouble at the moment is the temptation itself.

Stand up, Sir Paul

The worst possible outcome is to push forward a candidate who will act as a proxy to a powerful lobby operating behind the scenes, who will be a ventriloquist's doll - the ventriloquist, who knows? Dr Sant. What Labour now needs is not power-politicking but a careful selection of its next cock o' the walk, one with the ability to perform convincingly enough to turn round a 12,000-vote defeat into victory in 2008. A puppet will never succeed in this great task.

What any new leader has to come to grips with immediately is the entire thrust of the party's media. If anything contributed to the party's electoral defeat it was unquestionably its media's inability to appeal for a single moment to that swathe of voters I mentioned earlier.

The Labour media may have been all right for the boys. Its primary task, however, should have been to attract the unfaithful, the errant sheep who were quite happy to enter pens they had never slept or rested in. That task was never fulfilled and if current indications are anything to go by, will not be fulfilled. But none of this answers the question with which this piece began. What is to be done?

That the Labour Party needs to dig deep into its psyche, few will challenge. That it requires a new road map, few will deny. Most of all, the Labour Party is in desperate need of a leader with a genial warmth, a visionary version of a Pawlu Boffa, a man of the people in the best sense, a man who bravely puts on the European mantle and understands that there is no other future. The Maltese electorate will greet with open arms and minds a Labour leader who turns his back on the rough style of a Mintoff, the close-minded fervour of a Mifsud Bonnici or the alternating coolness and frenzy of a Sant.

Labour needs a man who will lead the party away from confrontation, from tactics that appeal to the lowest common denominator. It has occasion to discover among its ranks a man to challenge the likes of Eddie Fenech Adami, however formidable the prime minister is, on the latter's own ground. It must seek out a man who will transform the political game from one of endless conflicts and crises, a man who will break the mould that has been characteristic of its leadership since Mr Mintoff split the party in 1949.

Those who were close to Dr Sant during the past ten years cannot provide such a man. Will today's Sir Paul Boffa stand up? And when he does, will someone be controlling the party machine and media ready to knock him down? This is assuredly what will happen if both remain unreformed. There were signs as the week wore on that elements in the Labour Party have not recognised the sign of the times. This should be a cause of concern for the party.