The recently approved Nationalist Party (PN) document ‘L-għeruq tagħna’ (Our Roots) is an updated extension of the party’s basic document – Fehmiet Bażiċi – approved in 1986 and which served as the PN’s ideological guidebook ever since.

The PN was never a confessional party and always believed in the separation of state and Church- Michael Falzon

I have always argued that after a quarter of a century, Fehmiet Bażiċi was still a valid political document and, if anything, it only needed slight updating necessitated by the big upheavals in Maltese society in the past 25 years. The real change was needed in the attitude and mindset of the people in the upper echelons of the party who had distanced themselves from what the party really stands for.

The new document does not upstage or overturn Fehmiet Bażiċi but updates it and in so doing, basically confirms it.

Some have commented that the PN’s new document is a convenient short-term ploy intended to lure back the large number of PN voters who were feeling that the PN had lost its direction and its enthusiasm for change.

One could adopt the same short-sighted attitude to the 51 points enlisted by Joseph Muscat in his reply to the Budget speech. In both cases such comments would be as unfair as they are untrue, even though Joseph Muscat should have avoided repetition, wishful thinking and clichés and reduce his proposals to a more manageable – and saleable – number.

Other comments to the effect that the PN has made a historic volte-face and suddenly moved away from being a confessional party to a secular one are also wrong.

The PN was never a confessional party and always believed in the separation of state and Church so there is no change of stance here. ‘Religio et Patria’ was a 1930s slogan and I never remember it being part of the party emblem – certainly not since the 1960s, more than half-a-century ago. Its recent revival was simply a crude emotional misleading stance.

The divorce issue gave the PN the opportunity to show that it is the open modern party it was always perceived to be whenever it was successful at the polls. It did its best to lose this opportunity and risked the possibility of self-inflicting a most politically damaging setback by creating a situation in which PN support is severely narrowed while Labour attracts liberals who have happily voted PN since 1981. It opted to be emotional and irrational and lost the opportunity of showing that, even after an almost uninterrupted 25 years in office, it is the party of rational discussion, democratic consultation and real change.

I have always maintained that the decision of the PN executive to take a rigid position against the introduction of divorce legislation was a grave mistake. That the same party executive that was misled into taking that decision has now approved L-għeruq tagħna is somewhat bizarre but the historic aberration was in the executive’s fundamentalist stance against divorce legislation not in its approval of the new document.

After the divorce referendum debacle, the PN needed a fresh version of its old self: a party with a vision for the future, not a party that can only promise proficiency in holding on to power – aimlessly – in the current situation. L-għeruq tagħna seeks to provide the vision that inspires people of all ages to the prospect of a better future, a vision that was very difficult to conjure considering the cul-de-sac into which the PN had blindly ventured.

Divorce per se will not be an issue in the next 15 months or so leading to the general election in 2013 but there was always the danger that Lawrence Gonzi’s stances on the divorce issue could be.

The PN, therefore, is attempting to dust the stables and convince everyone – especially its disgruntled voters – that it is still a forward-looking modern political party. To do so while remaining in the clutches of those who helped in no small way to project the image of the PN as a retrograde party is a tall order. Yet the new document goes a long way towards achieving this.

The next issue, about which the PN has to decide in the light of its belief in the separation between Church and state, is the regulation of IVF through legislation that should be based on scientific, rather than on narrow moral considerations.

The state is bound to clash with the conservative Maltese Catholic church on this. Legislation on IVF is both necessary and urgent: the procedure goes on unregulated by law in private clinics and is not available at the state hospital despite the existence of the necessary equipment which has been left rotting since it was installed at Mater Dei hospital.

Prospects that a new law on IVF would be enacted before the end of this year are now considered to be unrealistic but postponing the issue by avoiding this legislation before the 2013 election would undermine all that the new PN document seeks to establish.

There is no other way: unless the tree is allowed to flourish, the roots will die.

micfal@maltanet.net

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