The short straw this Christmas went to, against some predictions, to… Simon Busuttil. And it was delivered by none other than this very same paper last Sunday.

I defend its conclusions not out of loyalty to the paper I work for, but rather because the word on the street is that the survey we carried was fully confirmed by other surveys, not all of them in the public domain. I have no other information but I would bet that even the polls carried out by the Nationalist Party give the same readings.

Polling, even on the rather small base it is carried out, is a remarkably precise science and its findings, unless skewed or thwarted, keep recurring and are also based on solid facts.

The past years have also shown the validity of such surveys in the past as was later proved by events.

There is a chasm here between the spin projected by the parties and the real reality at ground level. Right until the eve (well, not precisely, but let’s say until roughly a month before) of the 2013 election, the PN spin was that the two parties were neck and neck. We now know this was far from the truth. My point is that the party leaders must have known by then what a huge gap had opened up between Muscat’s Labour and Gonzi’s PN. Later on, with hindsight, the projections by newspapers and other media, which at the time were attacked for being skewed against the government, turned out to have been exact, not just roughly but in an even, precise manner.

The multiplicity of surveys now being carried out act reinforces their validity and veracity. In short, the survey is king. The last one to doubt their veracity and to try and do a King Canute with them was the hapless Lawrence Gonzi and look what happened to him. Maybe, in his defence, he had been hooked to the slim and unrepeatable victory in 2008 and thought he could defy surveys and get away with it.

His successor now has had more than his share of dire predictions, all of which have turned out to be disastrous for him and the party he leads. His first test was the European Parliament election last year and he suffered exactly the same humiliating defeat as his predecessor had in the March 2013 general election.

Now he has suffered an almost equally humiliating result. Last Sunday’s survey showed he has not made any real inroads into the Labour majority.

This has gone completely against the expectations of his party and its sympathisers.

One must also look at the context in which this result was reached.

It came after a series of rebuffs for the Muscat administration, which culminated in the sacking of Minister Manwel Mallia. But that does not seem to have shaken the solid Moviment built by Dr Muscat prior to the election.

Nor the fracas about passports, nor the employment of so many Taghna Lkoll people in government posts, nor the controversies about the delays in the building of a new power station and related controversies.

Over the past months, Dr Busuttil seemed to have made some headway in really taking over the party he has been chosen to lead and to impose his choices. He has been acclaimed and feted as the new hope of the party and its supporters. Now all that looks like a load of poppycock.

Some warning signs were there, we can now see. The same kind of adulation that surrounded Lawrence Gonzi, sheltering him from contacts with the grass roots and ordinary people, the same wall to wall coverage of the party leader on the party’s media, the same unquestioning support instead of open discussion leading to an open agreement. I dare add, without much close knowledge of the matter, with some people from the earlier nomenclature somehow surviving and apparently thriving when others have been axed.

The task facing any party leader in such circumstances is formidable, nay, daunting.

The party still has not faced up to what brought it down and only cosmetic changes have been made. That clearly is not enough – the surveys are clear on this point.

It is now more than clear that the GonziPN format refused to countenance the huge seismic shifts in the population. A large part of the Moviment that switched to Dr Muscat consisted of people who wanted to end, once and for all, the umbilical link between the party and the Church, specifically on the subject of gays and lesbians, on civil marriages and unions. Even after the pre-electoral drubbing the party got on the divorce issue, the party, this time under Dr Busuttil, failed to trim its sails on the Civil Union Bill thus reinforcing the belief that it has not really changed.

The party may have changed some of the faces with which it faced the electorate time and again, but the new ones, at least as I see them, are just faces and names who think that just by being chosen by the party leader gives them rights and privileges. I laugh when I come across Facebook pages of so and so defining themselves as politicians when they are as yet untried and untested not even in local council elections. They obviously think they have it made already, when they have yet to begin at rock bottom level.

The party, again, as I see it, has still not shaken off those whose misguided advice led it here. I can still feel the same fingerprints in some of the party’s strategic decisions of the past weeks as used to be there in the Gonzi times.

Then again, I sense a certain basic inconsistency in the party’s successive stances, veering from obstinate opposition one day to weak-kneed obeisance the next day. Which is it to be?

There is anger inside the party and most of it is directed at those who were either less than loyalist in Gonzi’s end times or who dared question his leadership. This is a difficult path to tread but the party, at least as I see it, has a choice to make: it either kisses goodbye to any hopes of electoral success at least in this decade and wait for the electoral tide to turn, or else it more sensibly admits to the many faults and defects of the past administration and eats humble pie.

Obviously, excluding those who made Dr Gonzi’s last years a nightmare, there are huge swathes of the electorate PN stands to lose once and for all, for nothing is guaranteed in politics.

One other reading of the survey is that people in general are not displeased with the Muscat administration. Maybe too, what brought about the end result of last Sunday’s survey could have been the admittedly difficult decision Dr Muscat had to take in jettisoning Dr Mallia. That seems to have been a decision that was approved by the country at large and, by listening to the people, Dr Muscat gained in approval at the expense of Dr Busuttil.

At this point, even though it is far too early in the electoral cycle, Dr Busuttil may either adjust to the plaudits surrounding him knowing full well that it is self-defeating, or else dig deeper and come up with a more radical approach.

We are talking here of two successive defeats, not counting the general election rout. When roughly the same kind of negative results faced Dr Gonzi, he chose to ignore the signs and plodded on – with the results one sees.

Will his successor go down the same road?

 

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