Reacting to Alfred Sant's complaint that the power of incumbency listed heavily in favour of the Nationalist Party in the March 8 election, a Labour supporter wrote in Illum last Sunday to recall how Sant himself had used the power of incumbency to ensure that he is re-elected MLP leader after he had reconsidered his decision to quit in the aftermath of the 2003 election.
"In that period," the author of the letter recalled, "I and other young people were meeting all those who had indicated their desire to become party leader. On the morning of May 1, 2003, while we were meeting a prominent Labour Party member who was being touted as a possible successor of Sant, in the party's general quarters prominent members of the party structure were co-ordinating an effort aimed at using the demonstration planned for the afternoon of Workers' Day to show support for Sant so that he would reconsider his resignation from party leader." The rest is history.
Responding to criticism from various quarters, this time round, Labour's intermezzo is going to take longer than it took five years ago.
However, the pertinent - and legitimate - question still remains: Who is calling the shots at the MLP HQ?
Sant declared that he had resigned from the leadership irrevocably and with immediate effect. In my book, this means that he has moved out of the party headquarters and someone else is holding the fort until the leadership issue is resolved. At this point in time, Charles Mangion is acting leader of the MLP. Reports indicate that this is exactly what the MLP executive decided last Tuesday after Mangion declared that he did not intend to contest any election for a leadership post.
The MLP campaign that is now being found wanting by many Labour exponents, such as Toni Abela, Wenzu Mintoff and others, was not a sole effort by Sant. The man who is mostly identified with the campaign is general secretary Jason Micallef who has expressed 'no regrets' for his failure and is consistently indicating that he wants to stick to his post, to the chagrin of the baying hounds who are all out for his blood.
Wenzu Mintoff, who is an elected MLP official - education secretary - and therefore part of the party's administration, has publicly stated that during the election campaign, the party officials never met. It seems that in the party set-up there is an inner group who were deciding things behind the backs of other officials. Is this group still active?
This is the set-up that makes Sant's hold on the party machinery so strong. I use the present tense because there is absolutely no indication that this group has let go its hold. I do not think that there will be yet another attempt to re-elect Sant to the leadership, but this group, under the guidance of Sant, could be planning to play king maker, only to claim its due after the coronation is over.
This raises the prospect of a new Labour leader abetted by the likes of Jason Micallef and Manwel Cuschieri together with Sant in the guise of the leader's consultant. These will therefore assume the mantle of the power behind the throne. In this scenario, the people who call the shots in the MLP will be the same people who have called the shots in the past 15 years - ever since Sant was elected MLP leader in 1992.
If the party delegates do not elect a leader who makes a clean sweep of the internal MLP administration set-up and of the existing party machinery, they risk having this scenario. This would make Labour's intermezzo a futile exercise. In other words, despite having a new leader, this development would only be for the sake of appearances and practically Labour would be in the same quandary that they have been in since 2003. In an interview carried in the GWU daily, l-orizzont, last Monday, economist and political observer Edward Scicluna expressed his opinion that the 11,000 or so who abstained from voting refrained from voting Labour because of its past.
I tend to agree with this assessment. I have no doubt that Labour would have easily won this time if in 2003 they had elected a new leader who inspired a fresh vision of Malta as a new EU member, while apologising for the mistakes of Labour's past.
They needed to find a Tony Blair who could reinvent the party while adopting a distinct posture that was clearly and unambiguously removed from the past. Instead, they stuck to the same leader who consistently decried that he had "no regrets" for his anti-EU stance. They even elected a deputy leader who often boasted about how proud he was of the achievements of the 1971-87 Labour administrations. Incredible as it may seem, the MLP is now risking falling into the same pitfall. Labour's long intermezzo can still herald yet another opera buffa!
micfal@maltanet.net