If general elections were comedies, it is easy to choose which iconic scene the result of March 9 represents for the Nationalist Party. It’s the one where the furious lover throws the man out of the car, in the middle of nowhere (or, worse, Nebraska) and drives off, leaving him with no wallet, no hat, no nothing, just a long, lonely highway stretching infinitely ahead and infinitely behind him.
Those whom the gods want to drive mad, they first destroy at the polls
And if the man was one of those slightly dazed characters that actors like Bill Murray and Gerard Depardieu have played so well, we’d know the film might well be just beginning. The man still has to lose his shoes and pants.
When the members of the PN executive council meet today, they don’t have to be film buffs to know that things may get even worse before they get better. It is enough to know the sequel to some of the European electoral disasters of the last 30 years.
In the UK, the crushing defeat suffered by Labour in 1983 was followed by a further two electoral defeats and 14 years in the wilderness. The Conservatives fared even worse after their crash in 1997. Not only did they lose a further two elections. Having been reduced to 165 seats (out of 659; Labour had a majority of 253 seats), they gained only one (yes, one) seat at the next general election.
As for France, President Francois Hollande’s record low polls is only half the story. Nicolas Sarkozy’s return to frontline politics is being broached because his own party, the UMP, has continued to sink in public esteem since its defeat last year. Those whom the gods want to drive mad, they first destroy at the polls. All these parties went mad after their electoral defeats. The PN had better be careful it does not follow suit. The gods have two cards they can play.
First, the PN members might be persuaded to go along with silly criteria for choosing a leader. Changing the rules to permit all party members, rather than just the elected counsellors, might seem like a good idea worth discussing further. But introducing it now, in the selection of Lawrence Gonzi’s successor, is worse than unfair.
The involvement of all party members calls for a long campaign. Otherwise, party members may know no more about the candidates than their public image, whereas counsellors are likely to have more direct experience of working with them or, at least, know other people who have. In 2008, the broader Labour Party membership would have chosen George Abela. We now know that the Labour delegates, who were then much criticised for defying broader opinion and choosing Joseph Muscat, chose better.
An even sillier criterion would be to rule out any leadership candidate just because he was involved in the losing 2013 campaign. People like Michael Gonzi and Beppe Fenech Adami have already given a clear-eyed analysis of the various factors that contributed to the massive defeat. While we might be astounded to learn that Fenech Adami believes that the party should have gone to the polls in 2011 (when the aftermath of the divorce referendum damaged Gonzi’s reputation more than the Libyan crisis boosted it), he is surely right in thinking that, by then, the prospects were already dim.
Moreover, eliminating people on the basis of their role in the campaign would have the effect of eliminating all the likely contenders (barring some newcomer). While Simon Busuttil and Tonio Fenech may have played the most prominent roles, apart from Gonzi himself, the campaign was clearly structured, from the pre-campaign stage, to surround the leader with others like Fenech Adami, Mario de Marco, Chris Said and Marthese Portelli.
If the strategy didn’t work, that’s because the die was already cast. But just because none of these made a difference in 2013 doesn’t mean they cannot ever do so. On the contrary, the lesson of this year’s general election is that the electorate is ready to accept back politicians who were, in the past, members of several losing teams.
Electorates – whether they’re looking at Tony Blair in 1997 (having run on a far-left programme in 1983) or Muscat in 2013 (having campaigned against the EU in 2003) – care less about the past than they do about two other factors: one, whether the politician has learned his lesson and knows what’s good for him and, two, whether he’d be a less detestable prospect than the other lot.
If that sounds rather cynical, that’s only because electorates increasingly are.
The other stratagem the gods might use to destroy the PN is to confirm it in its current delusion that it is a coalition of two factions, conservative and liberal. In fact, it is a more complex party than that.
Its history, remote or recent, makes no sense when read through a liberal/conservative prism, whether we’re discussing the differences between Ugo Mifsud and Enrico Mizzi, or Giorgio Borg Olivier and the trio of Eddie Fenech Adami, Guido de Marco and Ugo Mifsud Bonnici.
Indeed, it is a poor guide to what happened in the last legislature.
But if the party persists in thinking of itself in this way, real factions will form to live up to the labels. And a leader who emerges as a ‘bridge’ between the two factions will be no leader at all. He will just be a hapless mediator, waiting for a replacement who would put him out of his misery.
ranierfsadni@europe.com