Much has been said about the Nationalist Party’s need for “soul-searching.”
It is absolutely true that the party lacks the ideological coherence that is necessary for a polity to function.
It is also true that, as things stand, there are hardly any viable leadership candidates to speak of. European Parliament President Roberta Metsola was the uncontested crowd favourite until she pulled the rug out from underneath everyone.
For these reasons and many others – such as the abysmal state of the party’s finances – any conversation about the Nationalist Party sounds like we’re talking about a 30-something year old person who’s going on a trip to Asia to “find themselves.”
Concurrently, the frontrunners whose names cropped up at the top of a “leaked” internal survey are carefully selecting their soundbites.
According to a survey in which almost half the respondents indicated that they do not have a preferred candidate as of yet, Alex Borg (27.5%), Adrian Delia (19.3%), and Franco Debono (8.8%) lead the pack.
These potential candidates have been playing the media’s fiddle as predictably as one could expect them to. We’ve heard plenty of talk about keeping one’s feet on the ground and “listening” to the public’s great clamour for their leadership. Never mind, of course, that there isn’t a shred of humility in sight here.
All the soul-searching in the world cannot prevent a reckoning with the inescapable fact that the public still has no idea what any of them are talking about.
For all this talk about finding a common raison d’être or a great cause to fight for, there is nothing tangible that the public can sink its teeth into.
The Nationalist Party has been in opposition for twelve years and counting. Bernard Grech is the third leader to call it quits in that same time period.
Even though the Nationalist Party had all this time to chart its own course, it still cannot come up with anything better than vague platitudes about listening to what its members want the party to be.
Whenever you ask any MP in its parliamentary group about the outcome of this process, all you draw is blanks. More fluff about needing to be humble so the Nationalist Party can truly present itself as a government-in-waiting.
The implication is obvious: the party is either hard of hearing or deliberately sowing its ears shut whenever anyone talks about taking the party in a different direction. There is a guttural rejection of any deviation from the party’s narrow vision of itself.
If your parliamentary representatives talk like they’ve been backed into a corner whenever you ask a generic question about what they stand for, if you cannot answer the most fundamental questions about who you are and why you’re doing what you’re doing, then something is deeply wrong with the entire structure.
Both the party’s members and the general public are clearly sick of hearing the Nationalist Party talk in abstractions that often end up contradicting each other in a cacophony of mixed messaging.
The truth is that this isn’t about a leadership vacuum, or about bitter infighting, or even about coherent ideology, for that matter.
The truth is that the organisational model adopted by both major parties is an outdated relic that is perfectly suited to ruling a country that once was but no longer is.
The clientelism that drives both the Nationalist Party and the Labour Party was mostly viable when the Maltese islands were left to their own devices.
Malta’s ascent to the European Union should have brought sweeping reform in the way politics is conducted in the country. Yet again, the Nationalist Party squandered the obvious victory of achieving that feat by failing to update our legislation to better regulate political party financing.
For obvious reasons, the Labour Party was not interested in doing so, either. Our electoral funding laws are full of loopholes that allow parties and individual candidates to circumvent their reporting obligations.
To this day, it is impossible to actually know who the major donors really are unless they decide to declare themselves or someone leaks information from within the parties’ jealously guarded lists of financiers.
The end result of the Nationalist Party’s failure to hold itself accountable to more modern standards of governance is reflected in the Labour Party’s ability to do whatever it wants.
The only reason that the Labour Party isn’t in the same dire straits as the Nationalist Party is because it has mastered the dubious art of abusing public funding for private gain.
The government doesn’t claw back public support through adequate policy making – it simply buys it back or frantically backpedals whenever the general public pushes back hard on something.
Throughout this whole time period, the Nationalist Party didn’t live up to its lofty rhetoric about the rule of law.
It could not put the government in an extremely uncomfortable situation by credibly enforcing high standards of transparency and accountability.
It did not have the wisdom or the radical courage to pursue out of the box strategies like collaborating with other parties and/or civil society to launch a broad anti-corruption coalition.
Instead, all we got was lip service masquerading as an honest process of reconciliation and regrouping. Plenty of empty words about dragging the party back towards a winning avenue without any kind of real strategy in place to make sure that happens.
So, a free word of advice to anyone who is mad enough to take over this train wreck of a political party: you’re going to need to give us something real if anyone’s going to believe a word coming out of your mouth.
If nobody from the party’s ranks is willing and able to come up with a detailed storyboard that clearly lays out the nuts and bolts of PN 2.0, it will leave no doubt about the fact that all this waffling about and “soul-searching” really is just a nicer way of saying “we have no idea what we’re doing.”
On that note, I wonder what the flight ticket prices for Thailand look like right about now…
Excellent!