Simon Busuttil has thanked those people who have put themselves forward as PN candidates for the 2018 general election (yes, already), saying that they have stood up to be counted when “the party needs them most”. I’d leave the party out of it. Anybody who sticks his neck out in and for the Nationalist Party right now is doing so not for the sake of the party but for the sake of the country. Either that, or they have a natural predisposition to masochism.
Catastrophic loss, massive problems and isolation from power for the foreseeable future are the most efficacious ways of weeding out self-seekers and those who think of a political party as an end in itself rather than as the means to an end – that end being not their own personal success but a general improvement in people’s lives through policies implemented in government. The truth of this is illustrated perfectly by the manner in which the Nationalist Party’s self-seekers, recognising that it had no chance of yet another term in office after 2013, allied themselves with the future power well ahead of time and are now well favoured by it. By this I do not mean only those who had seats in parliament at the time. Nor do I mean only those who have since lost their seats.
Busuttil did say, however, that the Nationalist Party has always been there for the country. I wouldn’t know about “always”, but from the 1960s onwards he is most certainly correct. This except for the matter of the PN not having put up a fight against Mintoff in the 1971 general election that was strong enough to save Malta from the ensuing 16 years of hellish descent into privation, oppression, violence and economic stagnation under Labour prime ministers Dom Mintoff and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, and their cabinet ministers Karmenu ‘Il-Guy’ Vella, Alex Sceberras Trigona and Joe Grima. These are the men who Joseph Muscat has chosen as Malta’s EU Commissioner, Malta’s envoy to the World Trade Organisation, and Malta’s special envoy to the World Tourism Organisation. And that also goes some way towards proving the point that the Labour Party is never there for the country, but always there for itself.
The Labour Party is essentially governed and motivated by self-interest, and consequently that is the sort of person it attracts, both in terms of political candidates and certainly in terms of elector support. Everybody in the Labour Party appears to be in it for himself (or herself) and this kind of blatant behaviour is a magnet for those who put themselves first in the most short-sighted way possible, by failing to understand that long-term self-advancement cannot come at the expense of the common good. In the last general election, the Labour Party’s appeal to self-interest was direct. The result was a sort of all-encompassing delirium, in which people placed their minority issue or personal passions ahead of common sense and the common good.
It has been my cursory observation that the Nationalist Party meets with electoral success only when self-interest coincides with the common good: EU membership, for instance. We should not delude ourselves for a minute that there was any profound philosophical thought about a unified Europe which drove the Yes vote. It was mainly self-interest – and it was also self-interest that drove the No vote, but fortunately in smaller numbers. When the Nationalist Party tries to appeal to the electorate on matters of the common good that are devoid of all perceived self-interest – as in the last general election and the one before that – it fails. True, there were other significant factors militating against its electoral success, but that seems to me to be the primary one. People couldn’t see anything in it for them personally in voting PN.
Appeals to reason and the spirit of the common good just don’t work. People examine and consider their own problems, issues and concerns outside the general context and in isolation from the wider picture. Any political candidate who goes knocking on doors will describe the phenomenon which newbies to the game, full of idealism as they are, find quite shocking and demoralising. People live small lives with even smaller horizons. Their personal concerns, which to those with more highly evolved lives are not really big issues at all, loom large and take over their entire sense of judgement. Nothing else matters.
The Nationalist Party can spend the next few years slogging away at the coal-face of change and evolution, but the fact remains that the electorate will return to its door only when self-interest dictates – or when there is no longer any real or perceived self-interest in voting for Joseph Muscat’s party.
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