The country is being entertained by the piecemeal publication of a top secret PN report analysing its 2004 defeat. Mystery surrounds the source which leaked the choice morsel to l-orizzont and the whodunnit hunt seems set to overtake the content of the report in morbid fascination for the reading public.

It is an internal party document, a matter that would seem to concern the PN alone. It has been given obscene exposure. And yet the content concerns other parties, the whole country, in view of the fact that it reveals the thinking of the PN and the motives for its deeds.

Whether or not it was tactically unrewarding for the PN to attack Alternattiva Demokratika is not my concern. However, it fascinates me to examine the thinking of my adversaries and potential allies, how they deal with problems and how their values are expressed, what their values really are.

Evidently there is even evidence of the thinking of the people engaged to analyse the defeat, their values or the lack of them. There is also a difference to be made between the clinical examination of cause and effect by the commission members and the political action of the strategy group.

Was this the same strategy group that decided on withdrawal from the Zejtun election in 2005? Are they the same people who continue and pump up the aggro in the continued attack on AD?

Tonio Borg has joined George Pullicino and Jeffrey Pullicino Orland has joined them in attacking AD. It is a vast improvement. The strategy group no longer relies on paid journalists and pseudo-independent letter writers to do their dirty work. The PN has done us the honour of training its big guns upon us again.

It is repeating the outstanding performance of the infamous Luxol speech. Its values are displayed for all to see. They are a sorry sight. Gratitude was never among them. The recently published report makes it all very clear.

At one point it mentions that four per cent of the people who had voted PN in 2003 had told pollsters they would vote AD in a future general election. The analysts make this out to be a major threat to the PN's future. It is nothing of the sort. Four per cent of roughly 50 per cent is two per cent. It is the core of the Green vote that voted PN in 2003 under instructions from the Green Party, constrained to engineer its own worst ever electoral result in order to run the gauntlet between the necessity to contest the election and avoidance of endangering EU membership.

The analysts appear to have missed the 2003 Green campaign altogether: the Greens had reduced their request to No. 2 votes leaving their support free to vote PN No.1 in order to secure the EU referendum victory. The PN strategy group had not been able to stomach the fact that the Greens had found a way to survive and had worked out a means to gain representation in Parliament without threatening the overall result. The Luxol speech was intended to make sure that the Greens did not make it, not even on No. 2 votes.

It was not the attack in 2004 that was a mistake nor the public attack in the final minutes of the 2003 campaign but the fact that the PN did not and has not to date acknowledged the Greens' historic contribution to EU membership.

The attack is often outrageous but it takes no account of the fact that most thinking people are able to ignore it in their political considerations. It is what is expected of the PN leadership. What the analysts failed to ponder was the fact that a significant portion of the voting public was able to feel repulsed not only by the attack but by the outstanding ingratitude, the outright rudeness of the PN leadership's failure to acknowledge the signal contribution made by the Greens to the course of Maltese history in their 2003 self-immolation.

What is not so obvious are the reasons why the PN behaves the way it does. Clearly it is looking after its own interests: it does not want the Greens to grow at its expense, but there is more. The methods adopted speak of more than this.

This centenarian political party has been formed, crushed and reborn in its everlasting fight with the MLP. Its only method of fighting is that it has learnt in the awful school of bi-partisan all-out political war. It is unable to work out the obvious fact that anti-MLP tactics are unsuited to tackling the Greens.

There is no grim political history to unearth at election time. No time of oppression to invoke in rallying the troops. Above all there is no long history of dastardly tricks inflicted in both directions to justify the latest crop. In this the PN is the only debtor.

Greens have an enviable track record of commitment to democratic, non-violent politics in a palpably undemocratic environment sustained by the PN throughout the Greens' history. We have never faltered and we cannot be faulted. These are identical values which the PN claims to champion. What sense does it make to attack us? How can we be treated as if we were the MLP without creating dismay in the PN's own ranks?

With the PN taking up all the Greens' environmental discourse as if it were always part of its creed, the situation gets worse for the PN. If they are green democrats too, what distinguishes them from AD, which is the genuine article? We all know that greenwash is a new fashion with the PN and involves it in massive contradictions from hunting to unsustainable development pitched as an economic lifebelt.

So what nonsensical attack can it maintain? What is left as a potentially unique preserve for the PN? It appears to be reduced to the pathetic straits of claiming to be the only Christian political party. In an amazingly anachronistic twist it has brought religion back into Maltese politics. Apart from the fact that a large swathe of the population remains unmoved and incredulous when watching the super-Catholic antics of Dr Borg, there is an increasing number that are genuinely shocked to watch it.

The public allows Greens to be Catholic or otherwise on principle. It is what the public wants for itself. The vast majority of the Maltese want religion out of politics and deride people who ask for votes on the basis of their claims to political monopoly on a universal religion. It strikes at the very roots of Catholicism, the religion of the vast majority, to attempt to make it exclusive. It is felt to be an outrage by the genuinely devout that a political party with the record of the PN attempts to press their buttons on the basis of their faith. The Church itself carefully avoids becoming the political prisoner of the PN.

It looks very grim for the PN because what remains for it to sell in its competition with the Greens is very little. Its history remains and it squeezes the last drop out of nostalgia and tradition. Trouble is that its support can be as shrewd and cunning as anyone on the strategy group and after 20 years of PN government, flags, banners and faded films have a failing attraction.

There is also the matter of size. The PN is very, very big. It is also the government party, vested not only with the trappings of office but with virtually all the power and authority of the land. It makes the most of this but in Maltese politics size is not everything. In the third millennium Big Brother politics is as old fashioned as Stalinism.

For years AD was depicted as a threat to political stability. Experience from local councils where Green councillors have served shows precisely the contrary; Greens have consistently reduced the abrasion at the meeting point between the tectonic plates of the PN and the MLP.

Unable to begin to think of competing with the Greens rather than confronting them, the PN is facing the hardest test in its history, how to reform itself, how to equip itself for the politics people want: to be better than the competition and not merely less repulsive. It is not the Greens that are the PN's greatest challenge but its Jurassic mentality, the difficulty to change course when steering the Titanic, the shift from unintelligent seek-and-destroy political programming. Will they make it in time? It is none of my business.

Dr Vassallo is chairman of Alternattiva Demokratika - The Green Party.

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