Leadership
Rudolph Giuliani took the helm of New York during the worst period in this city’s history. The city was facing a crisis on all fronts. Giuliani speaks about his experience as mayor of this city in his autobiography entitled Leadership.
Dr Simon Mercieca is senior lecturer, Department of History e gives us what, in his opinion, are the cardinal principles that make a politician a successful leader. He carries on to make a number of other observations which curiously enough have been adopted by none other than Edwin Vassallo. This explains why Vassallo has come out victorious while everybody thought that he was going to be beaten for taking a stand against a group of pseudo Marxists within the Nationalist Party.
Giuliani states that a politician should only make a promise when he or she is thinking positive. Is not this what Edwin Vassallo did when he voted against the same-sex marriage legislation? He himself admitted that he decided to vote no on the spur of the moment.
In fact, his decision came as a surprise after he had committed himself to voting in favour of this law. Yet a positive strength inside him urged him to vote no. It is this positive strength that makes politicians great. It was this positive strength that gave us Mintoff, Fenech Adami or the great ecclesiastical leader Michael Gonzi.
Giuliani goes one step further. He insists that politicians need to have strong beliefs. When they build their political rhetoric on strong beliefs, they come out victorious. Mintoff built his beliefs on Socialist principles. Fenech Adami was inspired by the priest- politician Romano Guardini. Edwin Vassallo returned to the basic principles of Catholicism when he opposed the same-sex marriage law.
Vassallo won because the Nationalist Party has lost all political conviction. Once the party embraced Marxism under the guise of liberalism, it turned itself into a conglomerate of politicians who are huddled together simply to become more powerful and make more money. Vassallo instead sent out a message of hope to the vast majority of conservative voters abandoned by the Nationalist Party after refusing to listen to their plea.
Giuliani insists that a political message should be tailored to the listener’s needs. This is what Adrian Delia is doing and why he is being successful and is seen as a threat to the party’s corrupt administration.
Vassallo, moreover, was successful because he did not allow critics to set his agenda. This is another of Giuliani’s recommendations. He adds that politicians need to stand up to bullies. Was not this what Vassallo did when he defied the Nationalist Party whip who tried to coerce him to vote in favour of this law and then threatened him with hell and high waters? Was this not what Adrian Delia did when he issued a statement against unfair attacks on him and his family? Incidentally, this government has not yet put into practice this new marriage law, as government application documents are still far from being gender neutral!
Another interesting suggestion Giuliani proffers is that his political experience taught him not leave decisions in the hands of the experts. “Don’t leave it to the experts,” he writes. Instead, politicians should work and act using their intuition.
Giuliani’s advice to a party that is defeated in an election is not to unite its members around a flag or a new leader, for this does not work. Instead, the former mayor insists that even if there is a defeat, the party needs to organize itself around a purpose. This is something that the Nationalist Party failed to have after 2013; an objective. It did not even attempt to find one.
This is why Edwin Vassallo came out extremely strong. He succeeded in uniting the majority of party members around a purpose. In the process, a corrupt clique was divested of all its powers.
Flags do not unite a party. Flags are used by those who are part of a clique and who need to hide behind it. What unites a political party are ideals. This has been expressed very well by Giuseppe Mazzini, creator of the modern political party. What Giuliani is doing here is to reaffirm the obvious.
“A leader who fails to act until every group has been heard from, every concern addressed, every lawsuit resolved, is a leader who is abdicating his responsibility” (p. 164) is another observation by Giuliani.
This holds for Simon Busuttil and explains why Simon Busuttil’s political personality has collapsed without any dignity. Busuttil is appearing more and more a leader with no backbone. His reactions after the electoral defeat and the manner in which he is acting shows that he has no determination. My advice to the Nationalist Party is to refrain from issuing inane statements.
The statements that are being issued smack of political arrogance cum ignorance.
Even the way the party finally sought to justify itself for not censoring Vassallo shows that it is a spineless party. The statement should have stopped at issuing a brief communiqué that no action would be taken against Vassallo. Instead, the clique made an attempt at trying to convince the majority of the conservative voters that it had taken the right decision by adopting a Marxist stand on same-sex marriage. This is pure lunacy.
Yet, what really shows that Busuttil lacks leadership is the way he reacted to criticism from The Malta Independent for his failure to take up all the measures suggested by the Commission that was set up to analyze the defeat of 2013.
This is what Busuttil had to say: “Claims to the effect that the 2013 report was ignored are ridiculous. Suffice it to say that most members of the Commission that drew it up were later elected to the party leadership or other roles within the party and were therefore directly responsible for implementing the report that they drew up themselves.”
Clearly, Busuttil is blaming those members of this commission, who were given lucrative posts within the party for not delivering or implementing the report’s recommendations. The truth is that Busuttil does not have the fibre to assume responsibility for the defeat.
The weaknesses identified as problematic in 2013 have reemerged after the 2017 defeat.
AZAD was a case in point. Adrian Delia was right to question AZAD and wants it to become a political think tank. This is what the commission recommended in 2013. Instead, AZAD failed miserably in this role.
Alex Perici Calascione mentioned the administration. Again, the problems with administration were listed in 2013. Unfortunately for Perici Calascione, he was part of that administrative set up that brought about the disastrous result.
Indeed, the present modus operandi of the party in this build-up to the leadership race manifests sheer maliciousness and even the attacks on Judge Mizzi are despicable in any selfrespecting citizen. Good losers would be above such antics.
Unfortunately, the outgoing leader is a bad loser and has turned out to be a dangerous liar. In truth, he merely advertises the endemic arrogance borne by some of our lawyers.
If the PN wants to move forward it has, first and foremost, to rid itself of its superiority complex and come down to earth.