As the Nationalist Party’s search for new leaders proceeds, the party is receiving plenty of public advice about the kind of identity it should adopt or recover. Most of the advice I’ve heard, however, has been wrong-headed or misleading.
Advising it to become a more authentically conservative party is practically advice to set the PN at war with itself
The reasons are various. One is that, sometimes, what is identified as a solution is actually a problem. Urging the PN to become ‘more liberal’, for example, assumes that the majority of Maltese voters who identify themselves as ‘liberal’ really are liberal. But ‘liberal’ actually requires cultural translation. There are good reasons to think that a thoroughly liberal approach to public policy would actually alienate many self-styled Maltese liberals.
Another reason has to do with the mixed bag of advice urging the party to go back to its roots. Some have advised distancing oneself from those roots, to the point of urging a new motto and emblem. Others urge a fresh embrace. But the common assumption is that the PN is, at root, a social conservative party.
Is it really? True, some historians do assert this, as do many of its supporters, but it is noteworthy that the party’s self-image is that of a party of radical change, rejecting piecemeal reforms.
It has been like this since Fortunato Mizzi first promoted the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum in his newspaper, with its exhortation for a democracy inspired by Christian solidarity and human fraternity. At the time, the keyword was ‘democracy’, which contrasted with the political attitude of many conservative European Christians, who were monarchists or, at any rate, suspicious of democratisation.
Openness to a wider solidarity also motivated the debates concerning the so-called language question. As Joseph M. Brincat has shown in his history of the Maltese language, the insistence on Malta’s Italianate cultural hinterland was internationalist not racist. It asserted that authentic Maltese cultural identity was most itself when open to a wider world, not closed and insular.
By the mid-20th century, the world that had permitted the PN to speak of ‘Latin culture’ had changed irrevocably. The world had changed enough for that policy no longer to represent the values that inspired it.
Meanwhile, under Giorgio Borg Olivier, the party’s way of articulating its identity changed as it attracted the allegiance of voters from its right (the Constitutional Party) and its left (Labourites who distrusted Dom Mintoff).
Borg Olivier thought of the PN as a liberal party (in the centrist British, not the Italian, sense). But the steady growth of the PN’s electorate – the party’s share of the vote increased at every general election from 1950-1992, even when it lost – meant that an important share of its core vote was now conservative.
Despite that, Eddie Fenech Adami still defined the party he led as centrist ‘looking towards the left’. Under him, the party approved the document, Fehmiet Baziċi, that still stands as its statement of basic policy. It is unequivocal in stating that it is a party of radical change; that separation of Church and State are cardinal and that there are some areas of life in which politicians ought not intrude (significantly, a principle stated in the chapter on the family).
The document itself makes clear that it sees Christian principles as inspiring it principally in the practice of human solidarity in the public sphere; in not seeing nationalism as an end in itself; in thinking of individual emancipation and social participation as inseparable and calling for institutional creativity.
One can, of course, argue about the extent to which the self-image matches the historic record and that of recent years. If one concludes, however, that in recent years the PN has managed to be perceived as a socially conservative party, then one is also bound to conclude that, in doing so, the party has departed from how it styles itself, rather than lived up to its sense of itself.
In other words, advising it to become a more authentically conservative party is practically advice to set the PN at war with itself.
It is also misleading advice. The party did not lose the general election so dramatically because it got its major policies wrong. Yes, it did get operational issues – concerning Mepa and utility bills, for example – badly wrong.
But its major policies – economic, social, educational and health – were deemed fundamentally sound enough for Labour to adopt them with modification. On family and reproduction issues – like divorce, IVF and gay rights – there is nothing that the PN decided that it could not have decided in another manner while subscribing to the same political identity that inspired Fehmiet Baziċi.
The real problem was the loss of its distinctive collective voice. First, It was drowned out by the cacophony of the public infighting. Second, the party’s characteristic watchwords of political leadership as service and dialogue came to seem hollow rhetoric. Third, the party no longer articulated a clear, distinct message – as it did in earlier times – about where it wished the government to go.
The real challenge for the new leaders will be to recover a strong, distinct, harmonious voice, in the first place, and then to find the right pitch for our times. Because ours are socially diverse times, it’s unlikely to be able to do it using only one leader’s voice or by having a collective leadership cut from the same cloth.
ranierfsadni@europe.com