Next Saturday the tesserati of the Partit Nazzjonalista will vote to elect a new leader. Adrian Dalia is in pole position but Chris Said retorts that he will fight for every vote. It is said that whoever goes into the conclave as a pope comes out as a cardinal. Does this saying apply to political leaders as well?
This is the fourth election for a PN leader since Independence. The election of Eddie Fenech Adami, as well as this election, are being held with the PN in opposition. There was more divisiveness in the PN of the 1970s when MPs wanted to oust Borg Olivier than there was during the leadership election itself. The Fenech Adami and de Marco camps immediately reached an agreement of sorts to heal wounds. The existence of a strong adversary outside the party made inner healing easier.
This time round several of Delia’s supporters feel that their principal adversary is not on the outside i.e. Muscat but the PN’s present leadership. After the first round of voting they were shouting “barra, barra”. The cry was similar to the pre-electoral one but this time – incredibly and shockingly – it was addressed at Busuttil.
Ironically, many in Said’s camp also consider the enemy to be within. This election is not considered by them to be a contest between candidates of different talents, one perhaps having more abilities than the other. For them this is a contest for the soul of the party; the election implies the death of the PN.
Emotions are running high among the supporters of both candidates. Truth be told this is happening more and more in many elections all over the world. Television has helped us recover our emotional side after a couple of centuries during which the book culture considered our rational dimension to be supreme. A study by Searles and Ridout showed that the emotional triad of anger, fear/anxiety and hope/enthusiasm have migrated big time from the advertising world to the political world in the United States.
Will the tesserati even care about these serious shortcomings? In view of what happened in the last election I am not holding my breath
The same thing is happening during this election for the PN’s leader. A cursory look at Facebook, the newest kid on the block which is changing everything, will immediately help you realise how true this is. Anger and fear are perhaps the most common emotions expressed, many times in the basest of manners.
Delia and Said are playing the emotional versus rational strands differently than their supporters. During their press conferences and debates on TV they push the rational more than the emotional keys. They do tap the anger of their supporters and stoke their fears but they do it in a low-key way while pushing their audience’s needs for hope/enthusiasm. Said promises hope through continuity; Delia foments enthusiasm through the promise of new things. Besides, they camouflage the emotional dimension by a barrage of rational policy proposals.
If one compares the Facebook transmissions of Said’s and Delia’s meetings with their supporters one notices that Delia’s plays the emotion keys much more than Said. His speech to supporters on the eve of the first round of voting, for example, was more similar to a harangue. His supporters are consequently fired up. Said’s renderings, on the other hand, are more similar to his media appearances; the reaction of his listeners is generally pacate.
Delia has a lot going in his favour. To many PN supporters, tired of the serial losses and afraid of losing again, he offers hope and enthusiasm. He taps their anger against the party by dangling the empowerment carrot. His message is approved by people from different socio-economic and education backgrounds.
But he has one big problem. He is the only one of the four candidates who was not given a complete clean bill of health by the Consultative Committee for Ethics. Even after making due allowance for his duties of confidentiality, the committee was not satisfied with his explanation about the Barclays International Jersey Bank account. It highlighted his directorship together with Chris Cardona of Healey Properties and chided him for not voluntarily informing the PN of his involvement in the Mġarr project as he had obliged himself to do in his declaration of July 17.
Dr Delia insists that in spite of these positions of the committee he still got a clean bill of health. It seems that different people have different definitions of cleanliness!
Will this hurt Delia’s chances at the poll? Will the tesserati even care about these serious shortcomings? In view of what happened in the last election I am not holding my breath.
On Saturday there will be a tensed and feverish atmosphere on Il-Fosos while the candidates and their supporters wait for the result. Will it go for Said’s “right way” or Delia’s “new way”? Whichever way, whoever wins will find that there are many pieces to be picked up.
joseph.borg@um.edu.mt