After two consecutive heavy election defeats – one as co-star and the other as top-of-the-bill attraction – most people think Simon Busuttil has no option but to stick to his decision to resign from the leadership of the opposition Nationalist Party. The growing calls for him to reconsider, mostly an online campaign, can only further amplify the imploding feeling that comes with another defeat of – by Maltese election standards – mammoth proportions.
In comparison to the Theresa May debacle in the UK’s general election just five days later, Busuttil’s possible retention immediately appears to be a much more ludicrous thing to do. While May faces an uncertain future despite having technically won the snap election she ironically called to bolster her position, in Busuttil’s case it has been a veritable nightmare that no true PN strategist can forget as he or she ponders the future of the party, Malta’s oldest party, for the repair process to get under way.
Propping up a twice defeated incumbent is always a “safe” option for those within the inner – and probably understandably – choose to overlook them. It is a reality that faces every wounded party on whichever side of the ideological fence it happens to be. Some, like the Communists and most of the Left in Italy, had to re-invent themselves – leader, emblem, and even name – to make them more saleable to the tastes of a new, more savvy electorate.
We have our own examples, of course, and we don’t have to go back centuries. As Arthur Conan Doyle wrote in his The Complete Sherlock Holmes, it is easy to be wise after the event. Nearer to us, Milan Kundera wrote: “we go through the present blindfolded... only later, when the blindfold is removed and we examine the past, do we realise what we’ve been through and understand what it means.”
Like many at the time, I thought Alfred Sant was right in acceding to vociferous grassroot demands for him to stay on as leader of the Labour Party after the election defeats of 1998 and 2003. With the assumed wisdom of hindsight, however, one can safely say it was actually the undoing of undoubtedly one of the most intelligent politicians we have had since World War II. It was simply time for a change of direction for the PL and the 2008 election result that followed, however cruel statistically, was confirmation enough.
Now the Nationalist Party is facing the same predicament. To go or not to go, to keep or to discard – never easy questions to answer in politics, but answered they must be, whether it is about a prime minister who has won, albeit with a minority government, like Theresa May now and Gonzi in 2008, or an Opposition leader who ended up with a bigger second defeat.
I am sure there are many within the PN who secretly hanker for a Joseph Muscat story among their ranks.We’ve been getting such glimpses in the media. With Labour as his well-oiled machine, Muscat did in 2013 (and even better in 2017) what Emmanuel Macron has only done now in France – i.e. led a national movement to a massive victory. It will be difficult to assess the strength of the two interest groups within the Opposition, those who now loudly insist that Simon Busuttil should ride out the blues and get his hands quickly back on the helm, and those who can only see further chaos in that, particularly after the unsuccessful dance routine carried out with the party of one-and-a-half known as the Democratic Party.
As with Labour after 2003, the decision rests solely on the Nationalist Party itself. For known PN sympathisers to talk about possible further shrinkage of the party’s influence in the country is a clear enough warning that sticking to obsolete tactics and failed, negative methods of doing politics in the 21st century is tantamount to courting further calamity. Last Wednesday’s poor showing during the European Parliament debate – from which the vast majority of MEPs simply chose to stay away and spare themselves the misery – does not augur too well for the slowly-growing positive sector within the PN.
Fresh from yet another self-inflicted fiasco, the so-called independent media would, at this moment in time, do well to pinpoint the gravity of this hour to the party it chooses (of course everybody knows why) to support, whether it is in government or in its present state of free-fall. What this conglomeration of media forces failed to achieve in the 3 June general election can at least be turned into a welcome voice of logic for the nation to reunite in a spirit of healthy political dialogue.
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Hooray magistrate
Most people who have had enough of the tripe, the hatred and the venom that have permeated the social media in the past few years, reaching a crescendo during the recent election campaign, have at last been given the chance to express a sigh of relief. Magistrate Francesco Depasquale’s decision to make a FaceBook user pay €2,000 in damages to a yachting company over a libellous comment she had posted was, hopefully, the beginning of a new era of zero tolerance.
The fact that FaceBook and other social media outlets, including personalised blogs, are not a cyber free-for-all needs to continue to be hammered home within the whole judicial system. There is no alternative. If people can now pose as journalists by posting comments, views and other information on people and events around them then, like true journalists, they should also be held responsible for what they write.
Sadly, the case in question went as far back as August 2013 – four long years in coming! For the desired clampdown on social media abuse to be really effective, our law courts need to be quicker on the trigger, resolute, consistent and adamant over the burden of responsibility that goes with writing and posting things that are eventually found to be untrue, libellous and defamatory.
Magistrate Depasquale’s insistence that the guilty party was to post a Court-ordered message on the same FaceBook page it had abused is also another good way of assuring a victim’s redress. Access to justice is as important as freedom of expression.