I’m uploading this comment here by anonymous reader, “Banquo”, who perfectly summarised many of my thoughts on PN and spared me from writing another follow-up about this discussion. I recommend it to all my readers.
“Mark, the problem is that the Nationalist Party of today is not one civil society would want to engage with. The party is now a bizarre mixture of Simon Busuttil’s legacy (anti-corruption, pro Europe) and Adrian Delia’s legacy (populist and anti foreigner).
Organisations and parties like Occupy Justice, Repubblika, ADPD and so on would not want to be tainted by association with a political party which harbours people who call Indians dirty, once called Daphne Caruana Galizia a “bi??a blogger”, thinks Donald Trump would be a good president of the United States, and is not above rehabilitating people with questionable histories and values, like Franco Debono and Adrian Delia himself.
Intellectuals and decent politicians from varied political backgrounds, like Alan Deidun, Michael Briguglio, Marlene Farrugia and Godfrey Farrugia, were willing to work with Simon Busuttil in the 2017 general election because Busuttil was running a clean ship. It was thus easy for people of good will who did not want Labour to win the election to get on board.
Now, any intellectual, artist or organisation that gets on board the Nationalist Party risks having to answer awkward questions whenever a Nationalist politician says something that blatantly goes against what that artist, intellectual or organisation stands for. For example, how can Occupy Justice, who occupied public squares to demand justice for a murdered journalist, associate themselves with a party which sometimes shows interest in bringing back Franco Debono to its fold, who has publicly called for restrictions on journalists’ speech?
Bernard Grech is thus stuck with the impossible task of trying to square a circle. He needs to build a coalition but he cannot find a way to get rid of the nasty elements within his party, so the artists, intellectuals and non-governmental organisations simply won’t come. After Adrian Delia, the new leader should have purged Delia and his nasty elements to continue where Simon Busuttil had left off, the same way Keir Starmer in Britain purged Jeremy Corbyn and his extreme left, anti-Semitic allies to make Labour electable again.
The Nationalist Party was poised to do this when its parliamentary group chose Therese Comodini Cachia as its leader, but George Vella, the president of the time who cared little about how parliament is supposed to work and preferred to do Labour’s bidding, scuppered that plan. At this point, I have no idea how the Nationalist Party can build a broad coalition. It does not seem to have the capacity to get rid of its populists. The only expansion I can see happening is attracting Imperium Europa voters by harping on about foreigners, but that will scare the rest of us off.
The underlying problem that created this mess is that, some years ago, the Nationalist Party followed in the footsteps of the Labour Party and changed its statute to allow all ordinary party members to be able to vote for the party leader (who would automatically become the leader of the government or opposition, depending on where the party sits in parliament; Adrian Delia was the first Nationalist to be elected by this system). This is problematic because ordinary members of a party tend to like colourful characters who boldly proclaim shibboleths and promise to stick it to the other side.
Party members are not accountable to anyone but themselves and end up foisting a leader on the nation who satisfied their base instincts by throwing them red meat. This is how the Nationalist Party ended up with Adrian Delia and how the Labour Party ended up with Robert Abela. The former offered members some hard-right excitement after a massive electoral loss while the latter offered his members more Joseph Muscat-sized wins, and which party member does not want that?
In reality, the Nationalist Party needed someone who would continue Simon Busuttil’s fight against corruption while the Labour Party needed new direction to clean up the mess Joseph Muscat left behind, but party members tend to support their party the same way a fan supports a sports team. What they really want is to see electoral wins; the bigger, the better, and their ideology tends to be more radical than that of an ordinary person who is not a member of a political party.
In a properly functioning parliamentary system, the prime minister and leader of the opposition should be chosen by the majority of members of parliament sitting on either side. They are bound to choose the biggest adult in the room because they represent their constituents and are answerable to them, and because they have to work every day with their leader to make government or opposition function. Colourful populists tend to be good at jokes and one-liners but care little about the nitty gritty of day-to-day functioning and so leave chaos in their wake. It is not in members of parliament’s interest to choose someone like that. Imagine how much better Malta would be with Chris Fearne leading the government (even with the Vitals/Steward accusations hanging over him) and Therese Comodini Cachia leading the opposition.
Malta is bound to keep getting bad leaders because people who shouldn’t have been entrusted with the right to choose them. After too much post-Brexit chaos and many failed leaders who excited the base but could not run a country, the members of parliament of the Conservative Party in Britain belatedly realised how harmful it is to give party members almost sole right to choose the prime minister, so they took back control of the leader election process to get Rishi Sunak (the supposed adult in the room) elected. It is time that both the Nationalist and Labour parties in Malta do the same and empower their parliamentary groups’ right to choose their leaders while limiting ordinary members’ input on this matter.”
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