The recent months have been full of national debate about a crisis of leadership, whether in the Church or in the Nationalist Party. To my mind, however, what much of the debate has shown is that people have forgotten what a pure leadership crisis looks like.
What we have today is something else: a crisis of major national institutions that reaches even into Labour, even though it currently appears to soar above it all.
We can compare the situation today with the one we had 12 years ago. In 2002, we had a pure leadership crisis. The three incumbent leaders in the Church, PN and Labour all seemed, each in a different way, to have not much of a future ahead of them.
Archbishop Joseph Mercieca, in office for 28 years, was one year short of turning 75, the age at which bishops are obliged to offer their resignation to the Holy See. There already was much expectation and speculation about who the successor might be and whether he would bring more charisma to the role.
Eddie Fenech Adami, almost 70, in his 13th year as Prime Minister, leader of the PN for 25 years, still had to reach the climax of his career, that of persuading the majority to vote for EU membership. In 2002, the final critical battle lines against Labour, which didn’t want membership, were being drawn and Fenech Adami’s moral authority was considered crucial by the Yes strategists.
However, it was widely seen as his final battle. He had long stopped saying anything new, as a political leader. It was widely expected that he would stand down after the EU question was settled, one way or the other. Jockeying for the succession had already begun.
Alfred Sant, the then Labour leader, was only 54 and had only been leader for 10 years. In 2002, it was not clear whether he would manage to win another general election after the ignominious 1998 defeat. Occasional rumours of plotting against him leaked out. But what was clear was that if he won at the polls it would be only by capitalising on dissatisfaction with the PN government and not also by seeming a gust of fresh air himself, as he did in the 1996 election.
Together with the pending decision on EU membership, the uncertainty over the future leadership of all these institutions gave the country a strong sense of listlessness. It felt like drifting on a sailboat with no wind in the sails.
However, all the uncertainty had to do with the top roles, not the institutions themselves. The latter were still reckoned to be able to command attention and form and mobilise conscience and opinion. All they needed was the right leader.
It is true that Labour was then demoralised while the Church and, more so, the PN were confident in their ability to read society well. But, even with Labour, few of the faithful doubted that with a good choice as leader the party could begin to sparkle again – and be recognisably Labour.
Today, the situation is different. It is the institutions which are in crisis.
The recent criticism of Archbishop Paul Cremona’s leadership was, in one sense, very narrow. It alleged procrastination on the taking and implementation of important administrative decisions: a criticism of the archbishop as executive.
But it is unlikely that the debate would have blown up the way it did – publicly and with much misunderstanding and imputation of ulterior motives – if the leadership issue was not felt to be exacerbating a deeper institutional crisis, in which many priests and religious feel alienated from the wider society they are meant to serve, such that the challenge is not to read the signs of the times as to learn a strange new alphabet or risk remaining illiterate.
People have forgotten what a pure leadership crisis looks like
The PN is in an analogous situation of loss of nerve, which goes beyond the matter of the leaders. In both cases, the crisis is sometimes summed up as one of communication: “We’re not getting our message across. Must try harder.”
But it’s more than that. It’s a crisis of solidarity (“What joins us together?”) and of identity (“What are we for?”).
To lump Joseph Muscat’s Labour, as happy and feathered as carnival in Rio, with the Church and the PN might seem to be a particularly perverse attempt at keeping ‘balance’. But we’re talking about the Labour Party as an institution and in Muscat it has a leader that has declared political parties to be anachronistic, with the future lying in ‘movements’.
Nor has that declaration been just for public consumption. Labour as a multi-tiered decision-making body has been hollowed out.
The Muscat government’s specific key signature policies have not been approved by the party delegates.
One Labour delegate, posting a comment online fuming against the pro-posal to teach English to African immigrants, challenged the leadership to try bringing the proposal to the party conference for approval.
I myself would wager that the proposal would in fact be approved. As long as Labour keeps winning elections, the vast majority of delegates will go along with a formula they do not completely understand or necessarily approve of.
But that doesn’t mean the absence of an institutional crisis of identity and solidarity, in which it seems that what once was familiar has been taken over by strangers. It just means a delay – even a long one – before the effects of thecrisis kick in. Once the music stops, it will; very quickly.
This institutional crisis is not, of course, completely home-grown. Political parties and the Church are in crisis elsewhere, seemingly smaller than the challenges they were developed to address.
In Malta, as in some other places, it’s exacerbated by leaders who do not quite seem to understand the purpose of the institutions they serve.
We have a President who, prior to taking the oath of office, seemed to think she was becoming head of society, not head of State.
We have a government that treats electors largely as consumers.
We have an Opposition which, despite being called the Nationalist Party, seems unaware of the distinction between a nation and a nation-State. It’s chosen to declare, as a general slogan for the 50th anniversary of independence, that we have been ‘a nation for 50 years’ – turning all its pre-Independence leaders into snake-oil merchants who were peddling a nation that did not yet exist.
This not-wholly-Maltese predicament is sometimes attributed to the lack of ideology. On the contrary, ideology today reigns so supremely we don’t even notice it. It has the colour not of political party but of money and declares that no problem is a real problem if the money is flowing.
The real lack is that of narrative – of a meaningful story that gives us identity and solidarity and which organises our national dialogue. To have such a narrative, institutions need to recover a compelling sense of a common wealth and a common good.
It’s a shared narrative that enables institutions to pull through in a time of crisis because narrative makes sense of solidarity and shared sacrifice. Without it, no institution, no polity, has enough resilience.
ranierfsadni@europe.com