Here’s a quick reality check to test your sense of the Nationalist Party’s current predicament.
First, if Adrian Delia and Simon Busuttil had to kiss and make up tomorrow – livestreaming a fraternal snog that would put Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker to shame (go on, Google it) – do you think it would make the blindest bit of difference?
Second, do you think that the statement ‘Daphne had it right’, whether correct or not, has anything to do with (as she herself liked to put it) the price of eggs?
Third, do you think the current situation is so simple that no analysis of Saturday’s elections is really needed?
Fourth, do you think that if Adrian Delia resigned tomorrow the PN would immediately begin the road to electoral recovery?
If the answer you gave to each question is No, congratulations. You are free of the most common hallucinations that have taken hold of Delia’s critics.
Don’t get me wrong. Delia cannot win a general election. There is no plausible world in which he can make significant headway with the electorate. It is ludicrous for any Nationalist to take heart from the fact that Saturday’s rout was not as big as some polls had suggested.
Delia and his team cannot take any credit from having scrabbled part of the way out of a deep hole they had themselves dug – not least when it appears that some voters turned out to spite Delia by voting for his less preferred candidates. The gap between Labour and the PN grew once more the very moment Delia announced he would not resign.
Some of the arguments put forward on behalf of Delia either take the public for fools or else are coming out of the mouth of a jackass. Even if politics were like a game of football with two halves, it is recommended, I hear, to have substitutions when a key player clearly cannot perform.
And the campaign showed that Delia can’t. His personal ratings went down (campaigns usually boost them) while important aspects of the campaign – not dependent on the huge disadvantages of financial and human resources – were inept.
The more thoughtful of Delia’s aides would perhaps concede some of this but insist that fairness decrees that Delia deserves a full legislative term and a general election. But there is no fairness owed to a party leader. Fairness is owed to his or her political party. It is defined by what would give it a fair chance of making meaningful inroads with voters. Fairness is owed to those members of society who depend on the political party to safeguard their interests. Fairness sometimes decrees that the most dedicated act of leadership is stepping down for the greater collective good.
Right now, the PN is in no state to elect a leader – even to sight one – because it is hardly a party. There is none who would be able to unify the party
So why not state outright that Delia should resign immediately and make way for a successor? Because the PN is in such a broken state that, at the moment, it is unclear if it is unified enough to have something that can be called a collective good. Even if it does, it is so dazed and demoralised that it’s unclear it can recognise it.
Delia and his team attracted or retained a segment of voters that had been alienated at the time of the 2017 general election. These people voted him in according to rules they did not set, and under conditions where he won against the odds. If he had to resign tomorrow, and it seemed like he was pushed out, these voters would leave overnight.
These voters make up much of the 37 per cent that still vote for the PN. Any new leader would need to recover them, in their demoralised state, depressed with a sense of multiple betrayals, and somehow enthuse them again. Good luck with that.
Delia’s aides are often criticised for being self-interested careerists. Some no doubt are. Others, however, are not. For all their illusory hopes that Delia can recover, they can see things others cannot.
They can see the supporters who would leave with Delia, unless the succession were planned well. They can also see that there is no clear successor available.
How can there be? It is not just the leadership team that is dysfunctional. It is the entire party that has lost the ability to dialogue with itself. Successful leaders transmit purpose and coherence; but they emerge by embodying the solidarity of a party.
Right now, the PN is in no state to elect a leader – even to sight one – because it is hardly a party. There is none who would be able to unify the party in its current state.
No, this is not about factions. There is no Simon Busuttil faction, which is simply spin. There are individuals united only by demoralisation.
Whatever Daphne Caruana Galizia said almost two years ago hardly counts anymore, given the significant changes in the electoral landscape. Sixteen-year-olds have the vote. Older voters themselves change in a rapidly changing economy and environment. And, in any case, she understood a key demographic of the PN’s core vote very well but she also had no intuitive feeling for other segments.
Right now, the PN is arguing over whether to appeal to voters lost in 2013 or those lost in 2017. These are past battles. Different demographics will be at stake in 2022.
There is a lot to analyse in Saturday’s election. Frank Psaila’s result should be compared not only with David Casa’s but also with Josianne Cutajar’s. Both were favoured by their respective leader but only one was elected. What is the relationship between the votes obtained by Partit Demokratiku and Alternattiva Demokratika? Why did Norman Lowell increase his tally?
Before thinking of electing a new leader, the PN needs to recover its social intelligence – both its ability to communicate properly within itself and its sense of what social ground it needs to represent.
It must be a process that permits different leadership voices to emerge, in which the PN can recognise itself. Without this process, Alex Perici Calascione would remain the guy who, in 2017, was supported by Simon Busuttil and who didn’t even make the runoff.
Bernard Grech (and anyone parachuting from outside politics) would remain a huge gamble, just like Delia. Claudio Grech would remain the highly intelligent but also the most socially conservative of Nationalist MPs, in a society that has shifted leftwards culturally.
Roberta Metsola would remain the semi-detached Brussels-based MEP.
A proper social audit and revitalisation of the party’s communication structures would give each of these figures, and others, the opportunity to show if and how they have developed and come to articulate the party’s calling. They could emerge from their own shadows. The PNcan begin to trust itself and its intuitions again.
To have trust in the process, it would probably need to be managed by a golden oldie, a grandee with no political future. It’s not necessary to make people think of the second coming of Elijah but sharp organisational and interpretive skills would be essential. If he were delegated by the executive committee, it would show accountability to the party itself, not any single person.
You might ask if all this is possible with Delia at the helm. There is only one way to find out – by demanding it.
This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece