The Labour Party's report on what led to its third electoral defeat in a row must remind everyone of the Biblical admonition: 'every city or house divided against itself shall not stand' (Matthew 12:25).
We now know what we already had known all along: the MLP is riddled with internal strife and bickering and Alfred Sant's managerial strategy with which he was purportedly running the party was a big sham all along. Of course, the worst faux pas that sticks out in the report like a sore thumb is that Sant seems to have subscribed to the idea that tracking polls during an electoral campaign are just a means to satisfy one's curiosity. If that is a modern managerial style, I must be Luke Skywalker!
No wonder there were too many disgruntled voters from both sides of the political spectrum who had the intuition to perceive the skeletons in the MLP's cupboard, and last March resisted voting Labour giving the thinnest of razor-edged victories to the PN.
What is revealing, of course, is the fact that what the Labour media itself had continually dismissed as stupid allegations and barefaced lies have now been confirmed by its own electoral defeat report, to be the truth. In turn, this report has already been found wanting and biased - a sure sign that the internal convulsions within the MLP are far from being over.
Labour deputy leader Michael Falzon has openly dismissed large chunks of this report as a 'smokescreen' intended to favour his enemies as well as being full of blatant lies and misleading assertions. While the report talks of a system of cliques (going as far as to coin a new Maltese word: klikkiżmu) Falzon speaks of only one group that ganged up within the party structure. He is projecting himself as one who has suffered in silence for a long time until now that the floodgates have burst wide open.
Hearing him in his recent interviews to the media, I could not but discern a touch of paranoia but, as Henry Kissinger was once reported to have said, 'even paranoids have enemies'.
Beyond the accusations, recriminations, viciousness and bitterness that are so evident, what are the chances that the MLP will recover and regroup to form a serious level-headed political entity that Malta so sorely needs to assume the role of an opposition party that is truly the country's alternative government?
The newly selected leader will have the Herculean task of remoulding the party in this direction while making sure that it holds on together, picking up the more important pieces and all the positive factors while discarding the rot from the present shambles.
It is by no means an easy job and it requires the full five-year life of the present administration, to the extent that, ironically, avoiding an early election has also become in the MLP's interest.
If the chosen leader is the much-touted Joseph Muscat, his only real way forward is to somehow ditch the clique acting as the all-powerful 'party machinery' that would have helped to make him leader in the first place. This is a very difficult - but not impossible - task; but at the end of the day, this is what will break or make Muscat's leadership stint.
This so-called clique supported Sant as leader but grew to assume a power akin to a 'state within a state'. Some might describe it as the clique that hijacked the Labour Party. It is incredible, for example, that the party's election strategy group had no sway over what was being broadcast in the party's media even during the election campaign itself as the party's broadcasting media is this clique's fief. The strategy group ended up with its plan to promote a 70 per cent positive electoral campaign not being reflected on the media. There is an uncanny parallel with the way Dom Mintoff used an unruly and violent mob to prop him up in power, until this mob got out of his control and became a monster on its own.
Admirers of Sant often point out that he had managed to rid the Labour Party of those violent elements, which is undoubtedly true. We now find out, however, that he used a different sort of group to prop up his power within the party, a clique using moral, rather than physical, violence... and, incredibly, it seems that this group also got out of control and became a monster on its own.
Is there any doubt that the election of either Michael Falzon or George Abela to the MLP leadership is tantamount to the death warrant of this clique? The situation is probably the same in the case of the two other contenders who seem destined to be the also-runs in this astounding race.
This clique's best bet for survival is, therefore, for Muscat to be chosen as the new MLP leader. This is where Muscat's real leadership mettle will be put to the test. As the new Labour leader, will he have the strength and the ruthlessness to get rid of them and free the party from their hold?
micfal@maltanet.net