The poisoned chalice

This week has served to augment my feelings of detachment and astonishment at what is going on around us.

Rather than focusing on any single episode, or the sequence in which such episodes emerged, I want to focus on some questions to which I am not getting any answers.

The first one is, how come everyone is dead certain about the result of the coming election? It is not just people who believe in Labour but also, astonishingly, people who are intransigent Nationalists that aver with all sincerity, that there is no hope for a reversal of fortune.

And this is while each opinion poll states that an increasing percentage of voters either do not want to declare which way they will be voting or do not know which way they will fall.

I have never followed an election, the outcome of which was so widely predicted. For a party to fight an election with some sort of liveliness, it must have at least some hope that it can overturn the predictions. Not even Mitt Romney walked into the three debates with Barack Obama with such dire predictions. And he was as much behind the president in the polls as Lawrence Gonzi has been through this straggling election campaign.

All I can see on the PN side is people positioning themselves for the post-election period, when they will have to choose a new party leader. People are assuming that the PN will lose and are positioning themselves for the turmoil they know will come.

I know we are living in a time of opinion polls and surveys but as far as I can remember, I have never experienced a situation in which a party knows it will lose an election, with the exception of the Socialist Party in Greece or its counterpart in Hungary.

We witnessed these two extreme examples and wondered how people feel when they have to fight a battle that is lost at the outset. In France, Sarkozy was in a similar situation, but he put on a great fight till the very end.

Now, this Deputy Leader election, which has come unexpectedly for the PN, promises to be a trial run for the real post-election-defeat leadership battle. At the same time, we are witnessing a typically Maltese trait – the coalescing of support around a Well-Beloved Son, very much in the KMB mode, and the Lawrence Gonzi himself mode.

I make only a generic statement here, but I think that one reason for the political stagnation of the past decades is this obsession by people relinquishing power to usurp the delegates’ power and to appoint their own successors. It was unhealthy before and it is unhealthy now.

Let me now assume, along with everyone else, that the PN will lose the election. If that is the case, I think the party’s grassroots must insist on a very thorough examination of the principles on which the party was founded, on the reasons for losing out on so much support over the past years, on why the party in government, despite all the good it brought to the country, has become somewhat of an anathema for the country at large.

I had felt this more than a year ago, in the aftermath of the Arriva launch disaster, when I had opined that maybe Lawrence Gonzi had run his time. People were quite shocked then and I received many expressions of anger. Today, also because of all that has happened later, many have come around to this opinion.

But since there was no one forceful enough, or clear-sighted enough, to tell Dr Gonzi the truth, we are now on the eve of an election that the PN has no hope of winning. The country at large, let alone Labour – but even Nationalist hardliners – know or feel this.

There is now no time to change the leader, nor is there time to change the party’s approach. The election is going to be fought on the ruling party’s record in the economy as regards jobs, etc. People will inevitably see the same old faces, and will remember ‘achievements’ such as the Arriva fiascos, the BWSC fiasco, and so forth.

Predictably, the PN will try to scare people off from voting Labour and point to the dearth of clear policies on Labour’s part, the many archaic warhorses in the party’s wings, etc. I seriously doubt that scaremongering tactics can serve in lieu of a credible election platform.

I still cannot discern any substantial plank on the government side, except to promise More of the Same. I still cannot believe that the billboards chosen could be so stupidly shambolic.

Ministers keep running themselves into the ground with press coverages, meeting the same people, falling over each other to be at the same appointments, trying very hard to make it to the 8 o’clock news, amassing two, or even four public appointments a day and yet seem to have nothing substantial to say.

The more they keep trying their hands at what they call ‘programmes and initiatives’, the more things are being rushed, hence multiple teething troubles, incomplete works and shoddy work which will have to be redone.

The party has still not come around to discuss and present the main plank for the election. Instead, it is attempting to disparage the Opposition and is promising More of the Same. Throughout the 1980s and the 1990s, the party had EU membership as its main plank. In 2008, we at least had just started to use the euro, with the resultant sense of achievement. But now, all that is in the past and the party in government seems incapable of offering anything except empty slogans.

On the other hand, it is simply not true that two terms are enough for any administration and that it is time to alternate, as Labour would have us believe. In Bavaria, which is a real democracy, the CSU has been in power for all of 55 years and no one speaks of two terms being enough. In Spain’s Galicia, the PP has been in power for 26 of the last 32 years, and it even won again last Sunday, despite the huge economic crisis in the country.

There must be a reason for such continuity, as there must also be a reason for this awful haemorrhage on the PN side.

The party in government has always been a broad umbrella, a coalition of strands, going back to George Borg Olivier and perhaps even before that, to the twin parties of the 1930s and the 1880s.

But the manner in which Dr Gonzi has ruled the party, especially after the 2008 hard-won election, has reduced it to a very narrow base. People who formed part of the PN in previous battles, – the 1970s battle against Dom Mintoff and the 1980s battle against his successor – even people who were all for joining the EU in 2003, now feel detached from the party and its structures.

The party has been reduced to a rump and the nadir was reached in last year’s divorce referendum, where the party lost control over the way its voters cast their vote. Dr Gonzi was placed in a minority then and the last surveys to be published have revealed that that minority still believes in the PN and its leader.

In other words, after such a defeat, the party has not acted to broaden its base.

Attacks by rebel MPs have put the party leadership on the defensive, obliging it to retain party warhorses that should have been put out to pasture and to refuse to carry out generational changeovers that could have been conducted, were it not for the rebels’ attacks.

The party has also neglected to hear what real people, real families, are passing through and it has allowed Dr Muscat to become, by default, the defender of the middle class. This side of Budget Day, at least, I have yet to hear any real proposal that takes into account the economic and financial situation of real families and that posits real solutions to real problems.

But, the party tomorrow will decide, in all probability, to rush through the election of a new deputy leader, even before Tonio Borg is confirmed as Commissioner.

An early flurry of possible contenders has been snuffed out by what looks like a forceful choice of one person as the only contender, the same tactical mistake that took place last year when Dr Gonzi was the sole contender for a fake leadership election.

I would have thought that Simon Busuttil had enough sense and backbone to refuse this poisoned chalice and to insist on a real election later, following the general election, whether the party would have won or lost it, especially in the latter circumstance. There should be a real choice with multiple candidates representing different strains.

Dr Busuttil has already become associated with the present party leadership through his helping out and meeting with so many people over the past months. He is now going to be latched even more strongly to Dr Gonzi’s side in such a way, that he will also come to bear responsibility for what many see as the coming defeat. It will be difficult for Dr Busuttil to come to represent a new party, under a new leader, with a new programme.

ngrima@independent.com.mt