It was rather ironic for the Nationalist Party, as reported elsewhere in this issue, to hold a commemoration of Aldo Moro, only to have highlighted the light years that separated Moro with the broad positive and patient outlook on life and politics from the Nationalist Party under siege in the late 1970s.

What emerged in very clear terms at Friday’s commemoration was that the difference in outlook was due not just not just to the turbulent times in Malta at that time but also and more fundamentally a very different understanding of what politics is for.

For Moro it was, as the Deputy Leader of the Italian House of Representatives, Rocco Buttiglione explained, a means to avoid confrontation, so he never considered politics as a war. We are tempted to say that for the Nationalist Party then, politics was considered as a war, a holy war in which there are no prisoners, but this attitude is not shared by the Nationalist Party of those times only, nor by the Nationalist Party of today only but also, by extension, by reaction, by whatever seems to make Maltese politics tick, by the Labour Party as well, certainly the Labour Party that has just lost the election.

The no-holds-barred attitude exhibited by the Nationalist Party in the late 1970s, and which carried over to the 1980s (remember the mass meetings held for almost the whole five years?) and repristined by them in the two years they spent in exile in 1996-98 is mirrored by the same intransigent attitude shown by so many Labour writers to papers.

One will always find apologists of all sorts to say that circumstances were or are exceptional and maybe the persons who say so were, or are, right. And maybe not.

Over the years, the Nationalist Party has rather slackened in its philosophical and historical basis, and in fact this was quite evident by the presence and more by the conspicuous absences last Friday. It is not just the demise of the Christian Democratic party in Italy that has led to this state of affairs: the emergent group within the PN just has no philosophical basis, and it shows: it’s the technocrats who run the show today. The same may, and must, be said of the Labour Party, although this party has at least made some sort of attempt to train the young and budding politicians.

Both parties must work far harder at the philosophical preparation of the new generations of politicians, otherwise we will keep getting young ambitious professional people who just because they have a pleasant aspect or the gift of the gab think they are made for politics. With quite predictable results.

Moro was from a very different planet: his grounding in philosophy and in the philosophy of law, his whole approach to life (which is where his religious faith came to play a strong role) and his personal approach of listening, listening, listening brought him to understand why the other side thinks the way it thinks, almost to the point of empathizing with the other side, to be able to build bridges, to reach out, to help avoid confrontations, to lead to convergence.

Politics, as he saw it, is not about winning elections but about building the future, thus ensuring that the State keeps meaning something to the citizens, which is something very rare in today’s world of fast food and fast politics.

Which brings us directly to the present situation in our country. The result of the 8 March election is clear in more senses than one. It is clear that the Nationalist Party won the people’s mandate but it is also clear that this is a razor-thin mandate. There are quite serious issues that are not tackled by rash declarations in public, and certainly not while the party in Opposition is in such a turmoil.

The first issue is governability. True, it is the government which must govern and must be allowed to govern without seeming day in and day out or made to seem as if it is living on borrowed time and about to fall given one last push or shove.

It is true that there are concrete issues of how to enable Parliament to meet and enact laws, and the issue of pairing thus comes to the fore, but this, as in so many other democracies, depends on the two sides being honourable in the way they treat each other rather than in one side seeing how it can trip the other side up and the other trying to avoid all the pitfalls.

But the government’s right to govern is not absolute and the government must not adopt an absolutist approach to politics. The in-your-face approach which emerged from wide-ranging issues from the Partnership for Peace issue to the ‘offer’ to have the Speaker chosen from the one-short minority Opposition group has left a bad taste not just among Opposition quarters but around the country. The time has come for the government to publicly renounce to any gung-ho! attitude by its key members.

The second, and related, issue is governance. If the gung-ho! attitude lost the government signal support over the past months, it also lost vast support on the governance issue, how to make government accountable.

All that we have seen over the past months had more the taste of defending the indefensible (and then admitting to the truth in what was being said by the choices or non-choices of Cabinet. This is quite unseemly and shocking. We are now at the beginning of this new term: things have to be spelt out clearly to all involved and all must accept constant and intrusive monitoring of their actions, policies and behaviour.

Back to Moro. What the government must rediscover, and it will do the Opposition no harm in doing that as well, is the high-principled, open, dialogic, way in which Aldo Moro approached politics. For him the Opposition was never the opposing group but rather the interlocutor. Now that is surely missing in Maltese politics.