PN MP and Nationalist stalwart Mario De Marco is right to emphasise to his party colleagues at the PN General Council that the Nationalist Party is a center-left party. He also quotes Alcide Francesco De Gasperi, one of the founders of Italy’s Partito Democrazia Cristiana and the first Prime Minister of the Republic of Italy, with his famous quote, ‘We are a party of the center moving towards the left.’ This is true insofar as you consider the period of the PN’s rejuvenation under ?or? Borg Olivier after Nerik Mizzi’s death in 1950. The political development of PN was very much influenced by the Italian Christian Democrats.
PN’s political pairing with the Italian Christian Democrats had organic and dogmatic characteristics. On one hand, people were genuinely changing, and on the other hand, the PN had a tradition of following the politics of the Italian leadership. Eventually, the PN didn’t keep pace with Italian society, given that the Church and religion were much stronger in Malta. While Italy moved to legislate the introduction of divorce in 1974, Mintoff in Malta had promised Archbishop Michael Gonzi, as part of the peace agreement between the Malta Labour Party and the Maltese Archdiocese, that Labour would stop short of its civil reforms at divorce.
PN’s failure to keep up with the times led to the birth of activist groups in the early 1990s that specifically fought for civil rights such as sex education, divorce, and even abortion (?g?a?ag? ta’ Ta?t l-Art just to name one). Yet, PN never dropped its stance on social services, free education, and free healthcare. Education and healthcare improved significantly during the 1990s and at the turn of the century, and despite opening up the economy, spending on social services also increased and PN even addressed vulnerable minorities such as people with disabilities who had historically been sidelined.
These are just basic political facts and there is nothing controversial about this. What’s controversial is PN’s intransigence as it moves along with the times, or rather its regular contradictory position where on one hand it wants to pose as the party of modernism and on the other hand it is still afflicted with dogmatic religious positions, such as its uncompromising position on abortion. PN’s strange political combination, that of a center-left party that believes in a free market but is socially conservative worked in the 1980s, partially also because of a trade union movement that supported it. Nowadays, this combination of political values will not work as can be evidenced by current polls in Malta and the latest example of Spin’s general election where the center-right failed to make very strong gains in the election due to its alliance with Vox which, in Spain, is known as a deeply homophobic and misogynistic party. The European youth does not seem willing to accept a political right that is socially conservative and PN can take the lesson that is in front of its eyes, or keep negating it in the delusion that it may win the elections simply because Labour is the wrong choice for government.
PN has ample opportunities to invoke its left-wing values to speak for a very large section of the population that is increasingly being left behind, especially on housing issues, but this will not be enough to win the vote of the youth which is essential for any election victory. The longer the PN delays the necessary political changes it needs to make in order to get ahead of Labour, the more challenging it will be in the future to win the elections.
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