When a Nationalist Party leadership candidate comes up with the idea of setting up customer care offices in every town and village in Malta, and touts it like a trophy, one realises the abyss situation the country’s political culture is in.
After two stunning electoral defeats, it would be expected that the PN would look to the future. Instead, it looks to the past, to the Labour Party’s successful antics, to its ‘customer care’ services, for which read nepotism. And instead of coming out with proposals to eradicate that, it seeks to emulate it.
None of the four contenders for the party leadership appear to want to take on interim leader Simon Busuttil’s mantle and carry on his campaign against corruption. They seem to think that Dr Busuttil’s electoral programme was a failure. It was a failure but not in content. Reforming party structures does not win elections. Vision does.
In five years’ time, the PN will not be facing the same Labour Party it did in 2013. If Prime Minister Joseph Muscat sticks to his word and bows out before the next election, the PN will be facing a new Labour leader with his or her own ideas. The game will be entirely different. The PN will face a completely different scenario from that of 2013. Furthermore, the country would have moved on.
The PN has to identify the possible scenarios in five years’ time. Will the economic boom remain for that long or will cracks appear? Will the building boom persist at its current rate and what will people feel about that? Will the hiking rental prices continue at the same pace? Will the environment still receive a battering? Will people take kindly to the idea of legalising gentlemen’s clubs, prostitution and maybe even certain drugs?
This country is an island. It is highly overpopulated. The economic growth being achieved comes at a price: many foreign workers on the island. They are mostly behind the rental property boom but could disappear as quickly as they came.
The passport sale scheme is another contributor to the property boom. Will people still want that in five years’ time or will they expect something that is different, something more real, maybe less extravagant than high-rise for the super rich?
People are happily pulling down houses to build flats for foreign workers, a sad flashback to the country’s colonial past. Meanwhile, some families are falling behind, becoming spectators in their own country. Does the PN have an alternative to this?
The PN must offer a new hope, a new way of life within the folds of the European Union, membership of which brought so much change and not always for the better. The issue is not whether the party is conservative or liberal. It has always managed to balance between the two. The issue is vision.
After nearly a decade in government, the Labour Party would have left its mark on the island. It would be the Joseph Muscat era. The next election may be the moment that people would want to change again, if the new Labour leadership is lacklustre and the PN successfully offers an alternative.
Offering a Labour Party in blue will get the Nationalist Party nowhere. It will only come across as outdated as Labour speeds ahead.