It’s the new conventional wisdom. The Nationalist Party is in its sickbed. The popular diagnosis: an ideological rift between conservatives and liberals, which is tearing the PN apart. The new leader will need to impose a truce, which will probably mean a more frequent granting of a free vote when Parliament discusses controversial ‘moral issues’.

This wisdom runs up against a major problem. It just doesn’t fit the patient’s symptoms. And if the diagnosis is mistaken, the prescription could be dangerous, even fatal.

For the real symptoms of ideological rifts, turn your gaze towards the US and its culture wars: the Bernie Sanders supporters within the Democratic Party, the Tea Party and Donald Trump supporters within the Republican. Recall the vicious energy within the British Tory Party over EU membership. Or the British Labour Party’s over true socialism in the 1980s.

Ideological partisan rifts look a lot like schisms within the medieval Church. Battles for the soul generate millenarian movements, sects and visions of apocalypse. Orthodoxy is challenged, radicalism is urged.

Here’s the key point. Schisms and sects destroy a big organisation’s cohesion. But they replace it with alternative, smaller centres of cohesion. Above all, they have tremendous (usually destructive) energy.

If our patient were suffering from a serious ideological clash, the key symptoms would be mania, euphoria and hyperactivity. But the patient has the opposite symptoms, which are evident the moment you stop consulting the Facebook activists (for whom mania seems to be a hiring requirement) and the armchair pundits who use a crystal ball instead of conversations with the patient.

Mania? Hyperactivity? PN supporters who devoutly attended the general election mass meetings report listlessness, lack of confidence and apathy. Even some MPs report a loss of appetite for politics.

These are not the symptoms of divisions over morals and values. They are clear signs of a collapse of morale.

Ideological sects have a single-minded focus; here we have loss of focus and attention. Sects draw a firm boundary between who’s in and who’s out; here we have people wondering if they themselves belong or even care.

There is some energy being generated by the leadership election but it’s misleading. Ideological factions usually put up their own candidates. Here, the two frontrunners – Adrian Delia and Chris Said – do not represent different ideological factions themselves. Each of them draws support from both sides of the supposed ideological divide.

Both Delia and Said have, in fact, promised a more frequent use of the free vote, signalling they do not wish to be associated with a strong ideological doctrine but, rather, a more moderate approach to problems.

The energy and focus will only return when the Nationalist Party recovers its social intelligence

Delia has generated strong likes and dislikes. The dynamic energy of the campaign is characterised, to an important degree, by whether you’re for him or against. But this has to do with arguments over his personal fitness for office, not his ideological purity.

Alex Perici Calascione, the other serious candidate, has promised a free vote only as a last resort. However, this is because he wants to establish systematic dialogue on hot-button issues, rather than push one ideological line.

It is telling that the only candidate pushing an ideological line is Frank Portelli, a fringe candidate who needs to attract attention. Yet, the line he’s pushing, a far right agenda, has nothing to do with the so-called conservative-liberal rift that the patient is supposedly suffering from.

People who push the diagnosis of ideological rift usually point to two examples, where the PN parliamentary group is known to have been divided: the vote over adoptions by gay couples in the last Parliament and the vote over gay marriage in this one.

Those two cases are certainly instances of rift. But a closer examination shows it was not ideological in either.

In the earlier case, the PN’s disagreement was caused by a misunderstanding of the problem. The group believed the choice before it was between permitting ‘gay adoption’ and keeping the status quo (where heterosexual couples, married or not, and single people could adopt, whereas homosexual couples could not).

In fact, the status quo was legally unsustainable because of a then recent judgment by the European Court of Human Rights. The real choice was between permitting gay adoption or taking away the right of unmarried couples to adopt. Seeing that this right had been granted by a PN government, in which several of the anti-gay adoption MPs had served, it’s difficult to see the PN could have reached any other conclusion than to vote, however reluctantly, for gay adoptions.

In the second instance, the recent gay marriage vote, the divide was, once more, not on ideological grounds. There is a near consensus against permitting surrogacy (or legally recognising it when the service is obtained abroad).

The disagreement concerned how disagreement was best expressed. In other words, the PN was divided by arguments about the practical way forward not the values.

It is also true that some MPs also disagreed with calling gay civil unions by the name of ‘marriage’. But, by my count, the number of people involved is not significant.

The central disagreements within the PN over the last four years stem from divides over strategy, about good sense and circumspection. This is what you’d expect generally from a political party, although they are particularly pronounced when a party is suffering from a lack of self-confidence in reading the society it wants to lead and serve.

The way to recover that self-confidence is not to urge more systematic uses of the free vote. That is a prescription for further engendering apathy in MPs, who will feel even less need to engage with their peers, and apathy in supporters, who will see a party capable only of agreeing to disagree.

The energy and focus will only return when the party recovers its social intelligence: a reorganisation that re-establishes it as a network. Above all, it will need to remember that the real legacy of the Fenech Adami era (and earlier creative eras) was that the party didn’t stand only for the ‘defence’ of fundamental civil values.

It was also self-confident enough to create new values for people seeking fulfillment in a new society.

ranierfsadni@europe.com