Editorial

Just a week after the Malta Labour Party lost the March 8 general election, a number of people who are either directly involved in the party's administration or are known to be of Labour persuasion, passed their verdict on the reasons for their party's election loss in no uncertain manner.

Their views are practically the same. Some of those who chose to give their opinion use the same language, in a few instances even the same words. The first obvious question that arises from this is a riddle of the first order. When, after only a week of the election, most of the Labour people seem to know exactly what was wrong with their party, why, then, did they not act in time to ensure that they get back to government after so many years in the political wilderness?

A few choice quotes from what appeared in print over the weekend will immediately show what is the "new thinking" that has apparently got hold of so many within the MLP only after they lost the election.

One party deputy leader, Michael Falzon, who is unfairly getting most of the blame for the election loss, has been reported saying he believes the party should now try to get closer to youngsters and the different sections of the middle class. "We need to be more open to new ideas, new people. There's nothing to be scared of out there".

Speaking on the same wavelength, Jason Micallef, the party's general secretary, was quoted saying: "We have to appeal more to those voters who will be voting for the first time and the younger generation. We failed on that front".

Evarist Bartolo, considered as one of the most valid politicians within the Labour camp, more or less shares the same opinion: "We must re-examine the way we use the party media and start making much better use of the internet to connect to the growing number of young and not-so-young people whose primary sources of information and political interaction is the web".

Leo Brincat, too, offered his advice. He felt it was important to reach out to the floating voters and to new voters.

How is it possible for such a big party as the MLP to so palpably neglect the young? Was not reaching out to the young an obvious need?

Who, within the party, was holding back from attempting to start making the party more appealing to the young?

It may be true that most of those who attended the political activity on the University campus just before the election were biased against Labour but surely the party's unmeasured words in reaction to it did not help put across the right image of the MLP among the younger generation.

Now, after the election, party people are again talking in terms of the need to improve the party's image, to change its style in order to wipe out the stigma born of the worst characteristics of its past. When its radio and television stations - as well as those of the Nationalist Party - made an absolute mockery of supposedly news programmes, it is distinctly mind-boggling, to say the least, how the MLP general secretary now has the courage to say that he believes the party needed to be more sophisticated in their media and in public speeches. More sophisticated?

Its stations do not even know the meaning of the word yet! Again, this applies in equal measure to the PN's stations.

Do the MLP and the PN truly believe they won one extra single vote through their "news" programmes, which, more than anything else, insulted the intelligence of the people most of the time?

Dominic Fenech, a former general secretary of the MLP, is right: The MLP needs "to open the windows of its headquarters, preferably on a windy day, and let an overdose of oxygen in to have an awakening, more than a reform..." Well said.