Labour sitting pretty
It has been nearly 100 days since the Labour Party handsomely defeated the Nationalist Party-Partit Demokratiku coalition in the general election with a staggering 35,000 votes, a slightly larger margin than that obtained four years earlier.
Since then, the Labour government has embarked on a continuation of its previous work, strengthened by the knowledge that the great majority of the people endorsed its endeavours.
The Opposition is still in search of a new leader and is evidently split on the way forward, giving Labour very much of a free ride over these last three months. It is the Nationalist Party which has been mostly in the news since the 3 June polls, first because of the controversy over the gay marriage law, which exposed a party still in difficulty to accept minority rights, and more recently due to the election for the party’s top position. The vicious attacks on one particular candidate, Adrian Delia, by what he himself described as the “establishment” clearly show that
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whatever the outcome of the 16 September election, the PN will still take a long time to get back on its feet.
In all this, and presumably for the months to come, Labour will not have much of an opposition to contend with, given that the internal strife in the PN is set to go beyond the election of its new leader. Let us remember that once the election for party leader is over, there will be a similar exercise for the election of the two deputy leaders and then for the party’s administration, a process that will prolong the PN’s limbo status. One of the moments that will be remembered the most this summer is the photo of Prime Minister Joseph Muscat enjoying a well-deserved holiday in Italy, sipping wine while exponents of the Nationalist Party were – and still are – embroiled in their bitter battle, inside Dar Ċentrali as well as on social media. That photo epitomises Labour’s tranquillity as against the Nationalist Party’s chaos.
Labour has been able to maintain its momentum since winning the election, picking up where it left off in the previous legislature in terms of minority rights by introducing gay marriage legislation, and while unemployment continues to go down and economic growth remains way ahead of the European average.
It was only this week that the National Statistics Office published a report showing that the Gross Domestic Product grew by 6.4 per cent in real terms in the second quarter of 2017 – and this at a time when the country was right in the middle of an election campaign, which is normally a time associated with a slowdown.
There is no doubt that Labour’s policies are working, and are working well. The feel-good factor that characterised the months before the election was carried forward after the 3 June polls, and it looks set to continue. The government is now hard at work preparing the budget for 2018, and will probably be presenting it with an Opposition still in disarray and licking its wounds.