A hostile corporate take-over

The events in the Nationalist Party are a tragedy for Malta, and not just for the party itself.

People are gravely concerned, as well they should be, who have nothing to do with the party itself – I am one of them – but who are acutely aware of the serious consequences for the country in which we live if the Opposition is taken over by the same nature of people who have taken over the government. It is not surprising that the chief contender in the leadership race is repeating the speech patterns and rhetoric of the Keith Schembri gang. It is not because he is their tool, as some suspect, or because he is “secretly Labour”. People like that have no real political beliefs or sympathies. It is because he has the same mentality. When people have the same mentality, they think and speak the same way. They share opinions and beliefs and they find themselves in agreement with each other. They do not see the terrible shortcomings in each other because they are the same way or think and behave the same way.

It is not a matter of whether Adrian Delia is able to fight the gang in government. That misses the point entirely. It is not even a matter of whether he is willing to do so. That, too, misses the point. The real question we should be asking, though to me the answer is already more than obvious from what he has said during this leadership campaign and from his completely invisibility before the general election, is whether Dr Delia thinks there is actually anything wrong with the gang in government and their choices. Because from where I’m sitting, it doesn’t seem to me that he does.

He’s not appalled by their behaviour. He has not said that it is wrong. He has not made any kind of statement about how he thinks people in government should behave, and how it is not like those currently in government are behaving. He has not said enough about corruption in government contracts, or the shadiness of practically every significant government deal. He has not told us what he thinks, and that means he is not at all exercised by it. Instead, he has told us that he wants “proof” – just like the Labour gang and the messages they put out to brainwash people on social media. Have they brainwashed Adrian Delia too? No, he probably thought that way to begin with.

The whole point of a political party is that it has political beliefs, a policy, that it stands for something. It is not simply a team of people whose aim is to win a football game. Yes, there is what is now known as the phenomenon of “political fans”, yes: increasing numbers of people throughout the democratic world, and not just in Malta, who support a political leader as they would a performer or a boxer or a tennis player, and who support political parties as they would a football team. They will stick to the people they champion come what may, unthinkingly. They will nail their colours to that particular mast and stick to it, through thick and thin, enjoying the feeling of belonging. That is what it is all about.

But for the rest, this is a disaster. If Adrian Delia is elected, with his hollow thoughts and hollow speech, and all his talk about winning like at football but nothing about what comes afterwards, the thinking people who have made up the core of the Nationalist Party’s vote for decades, even to the extent of coming in from former support for other parties, will move off in droves. I am one of them. No serious person can possibly support or vote for a political party led by a man so hollow. On the swings he will gather his lost sheep, those of the ‘I’m so hurt’ pathetic variety, and on the roundabouts he will lose almost everyone I know who has any sense at all.

Whom will we vote for? That’s a difficult question. People who think as I do will certainly not be voting Labour for the same reasons that we won’t