The election, predicted as it was, of 34-year-old Joseph Muscat as leader of the MLP and, eventually, Leader of the Opposition, will give the party, which has been in opposition for far too long, renewed hope that this young man will lead it to victory in the 2013 polls just as Dom Mintoff did when he became MLP leader aged 33. The MLP buck now stops with Dr Muscat.
We have been living in a vacuum. The question of who was going to be Leader of the Opposition has occupied our minds to such an unprecedented extent that it seems as if the new PN government is functioning in a state of suspended animation. It has been a strange three months. The PN or rather gonzipn, reassumed the reins of power as if they had never held them before after having won yet another election because of the self-imposed weaknesses of the contending party.
I will not presume to tell Dr Muscat what to do; far too many people more erudite, perceptive and qualified than I will be taking on that role in the next few weeks. However, I will ask him to remember that there are people in Malta who deliberately wish to be floating voters as this is an intellectual luxury that reflects democracy in its purest form.
The freedom to choose what one deems to be the best party for you is akin to the liberalisation of the media that holds freedom of thought and expression as sacrosanct.
Why should I, Kenneth Zammit Tabona, vote PN because I have always done so? Why should I vote because of peer or family pressure? Why should I vote to receive my pound of flesh from the MP I have supported or to retain my privileges as a supporter of one party and not the other?
People want to vote for a person or party that seriously undertakes the task of governing us without silly puerile rhetoric and mudslinging to achieve its aim. For goodness sake do not even hope, as Alfred Sant and his adherents did, that you can win an election simply by raking up muck about members of the other party. As we have seen in the newish Gonzi Cabinet, just like the Lernaean Hydra, political parties can re-grow heads at the rate of knots!
Dr Muscat is a product of his generation. He is on Facebook and represents a new type of Maltese middle class that evolved in the last quarter of the last century to reach its apogee now.
People in their 30s today are far more savvy than we were way back in 1987 when the intellectual renaissance out of the dark ages had not even begun to be realised.
Dr Muscat represents a fresh outlook as, for instance, he is the only one of the candidates to have spoken openly about divorce and gay rights. His Brussels stint must have given him an added insight into what the man in the street really needs in this day and age and removed the blinkers that all too often stunt the perceptions of the average Maltese MP into conservatism.
Mercifully, Malta has evolved in leaps and bounds since Independence and history has shown us quite clearly that keeping a party in power over too long a period is a very dangerous thing. This is why Dr Muscat and those around him must realise that the next four and a half years are crucial.
The reorganisation of the party is fundamental. Fail to do that and the cobwebs and dust that all but smothered the MLP will become fossilised and never disappear but remain like a dead weight on a party that once upon a time was the byword in progressiveness and open thought. Over the last 50 years the MLP has forgotten its raison d'être; its mission of universal suffrage, its determination to bring education to all levels and its leadership in the sphere of human rights.
Ironically, the PN has usurped, with great alacrity, political acumen and, above all, unqualified success, all these traditional socialist attributes, leaving the MLP wandering helplessly in an ideological wilderness.
Dr Muscat must reinvent the MLP and his being in the magical age group that he is will prove to be a great asset as he was the only one of the candidates who is not tarred by associations with the Mintoff and Mifsud Bonnici regimes.
Dr Muscat is free from all the shenanigans and skullduggery that went on in the 1980s. If he can, sooner rather than later, show not only the delegates who voted him in, not only the party he now leads, but the whole of Malta that he means business and is nobody's man but his own then the 2013 election should be a walkover.
kzt@onvol.net