Three conditions mark the current contest for the leadership of the Nationalist Party: The small electorate the nature of the electorate and the fact that the party is in government.

The electorate is made up of around 850 men and women. It is small enough so that all that is needed for a 10 per cent lead by candidate A over candidate B to vanish is for 43 people to shift their vote from A to B. So this is an election where marketing counts for much less than the one-on-one meetings that the candidates have with each party councillor.

These 850 councillors are the people who work at the rock-face of partisan politics. Their daily political experience is that of chipping away for every vote. On the lofty peaks of the PN, the senior officials might well be motivated by a vision for the country, a strategy to actualise the vision and policy measures to incarnate it. But councillors tend to consider policies not only on their merits but also with deep interest to see if exceptions are allowed (by, say, Mepa) that would accommodate the local requests that come to them.

So while the country waits to see if the process will throw up a leader who is capable of delivering value for public money, economic growth and creative welfare reform, the councillors will also be scrutinising his soundness as a PN man. This is not to say councillors will not also be seeking the qualities of a national leader who has broad appeal - the councillors are not Aztecs being asked to consecrate a non-violent high priest or Apaches being asked to approve of Gandhi.

The correct analogy is with asking members of Opus Dei to vote for an ecumenical Pope - entirely possible, but the candidate might do well to steer away from too many specific policy proposals and he will need a feather or two from the Holy Spirit to tickle the voters' fancy. The councillors will be voting according to their judgment of the man, not of his policies.

So what criteria should they adopt in judging the man? I suggest four.

First, the voters should pay attention to how a candidate speaks of his rivals. The fact that the party is going through this process while it is in government means that the winner will go on, in a short while, to govern the country. There will inevitably be wounds inflicted in any contest; but in a contest like this one the wounds must heal quickly if the government is to keep its morale. A candidate who is too negative about his rivals probably disqualifies himself from serious consideration as a future enthusing team leader.

Second, the new leader will take the party into a general election where it will be asking the electorate for a further five years of government after 19 years of almost continuous PN government. It is not an impossible task if the Labour Party by that time would not have renewed itself. But the new PN leader will have to be the one most likely to persuade new candidates, of a certain professional weight, to contest the general election in his party's interest. The PN cannot afford to go into the next general election without new faces lined up to assume positions of ministerial responsibility.

Third, since the new leader will shortly also be prime minister, he must also be the person most likely to secure the consent of the governed. He will have to do this under difficult conditions for any government - where the economy is not doing well and where social welfare needs to be redesigned. It goes without saying that he will need to be decisive, but his style of decision-making and the consultative openness of his government will be crucial to the successful outcome of the decisions he takes.

Fourth, the new leader ought to be the man who can best judge "what comes next" for the country - not because he imposes his will on it but because he has the ability to see what is creatively emerging out of society itself; and then to coax it out supportively, giving an institutional framework to the key Christian Democrat values of solidarity and subsidiarity.

Next week: the future of "solidarity".