At the end, it had to be a lawyer to catch a lawyer.
Franco Debono is as controversial as they come, with all his past and background. He is probably the least representative of the PN cardholders who will vote this week to elect the new PN leader. From being the butt of so many posts by Daphne Caruana Galizia, he has now come around to say that Daphne is right to argue that Adrian Delia should not be chosen as the new PN leader.
Maybe Franco’s multiple rants will not persuade Party members to not vote for Dr Delia. On the contrary, seeing what happened in the first phase of the election, such attacks will only strengthen Dr Delia.
Yet Dr Debono’s arguments – well, at least some of them – are trenchant, conclusive arguments.
One of them runs somewhat like this: On 14 May, Dr Delia refused an offer by the Party to be a candidate in the 3 June election, even though the sudden decision by Tonio Fenech not to take part in the election should have opened a huge window of opportunity for Dr Delia in their common district. Yet not more than two weeks after the election, Dr Delia was running for the new PN leader.
It is inconceivable, so Franco Debono argued – and I agree with him – that in just these few weeks, Delia was converted to the idea and prepared the groundwork for his candidacy.
The reason has to be the existence of a group preparing the groundwork for Dr Delia and this group must have been in existence before the election debacle. The thing is that, what we know of this group – especially the Deputy Secretary of the PN, Jean-Pierre Debono – is that they were at the centre of the PN machine fighting the election.
Were they really leading the PN campaign – which is what Franco Debono was asking – or were they secretly plotting for the PN to lose by the huge margin it did and preparing the ground for Dr Delia?
When Dr Delia borrows a leaf from Labour and rants against the ‘clique’ running the Party (which he never identifies – apart from Daphne, who is not a Party member), one has only to look at the people surrounding him to realise that they, in fact, are the real clique.
Maybe this palace coup wants to get rid of people like Rosette Thake, the secretary-general, and maybe other Simon Busuttil appointees, and a Delia leader of the Party would facilitate all this.
Of course, this reasoning may not resonate with PN cardholders. All they seem to hold on to is Dr Delia – the one with the fighting spirit, the man with the facile arguments, the energetic person all ‘hail fellow and well met’, pressing the flesh and promising to infuse a new spirit into the Party – without ever getting into specifics. But then he studiously avoids being specific on national themes too. His speeches are vapid and a chain of non-specific promises. The height of irony is when he commits himself to the fight against prostitution but then replies to Daphne’s claims regarding the use of the London property by launching a series of libel cases instead of facing up to the claims and accepting/denying/whatever: bad crisis management, to begin with.
At this point, given the way PN supporters’ minds work, after the second consecutive defeat at the polls and the way Dr Delia transforms every claim into an attack by ‘the clique’, and also given the weakness of his opponent, Chris Said, the most probable outcome of Saturday’s vote is a Delia win.
The cardholders, however, must remember that they have more than one means of ensuring their opinions are taken notice of, regardless of whether or not their numbers make them a majority or a minority. They must not feel obliged to vote for Dr Said if he doesn’t convince them; nobody is forcing them to vote if they feel they cannot.
And if the Party finally ends up having a leader they honestly feel it shouldn’t have, I feel that the best advice is what was declaimed by Procuratore Generale Francesco Saverio Borelli on 12 January 2002 at the beginning of a new year at the Milan Courts: “Resistere, resistere, resistere”. That was the second year of Berlusconi as Italian premier.
Those were the times when Mani Pulite was coming to an end and Berlusconi looked like being triumphant everywhere. This clarion call helped shore up dispirited Italians who faced not just the Berlusconi of votes but also the Berlusconi of a huge media empire.
Not even Adrian Delia is that powerful.
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