In a world of hustle and
bustle, few people have time for reflection. Those who do stop and reflect and, after moving a few steps backwards, take a deep breath to survey the Maltese political arena, may be struck by signs indicating the decline of the Christian Democratic fervour that once characterised the Nationalist Party.
Is this the sunset of the core element within the Nationalist Party or is the PN about to endure another swing of the pendulum?
Dogmatic Christian Democracy was on the wane and started to fall into electoral disrepute in Western Europe with the eclipse of the likes of Fanfani and Helmut Kohl. Relatively young voices were raised against the diehards. They started to advocate a shift towards market economics and away from the old ideology. The urge for reform reached a crescendo at the realisation of hardening electoral opinion.
Lost elan
Shorn of the ideology that cemented it together, the Nationalist Party began to lose its élan. Faceless business interests first penetrated its peripheries and subsequently invited kindred spirits to help them take over the party inner sanctum. But no government, however powerful, could construct and manage national economies with efficiency, without seeing to the equitable redistribution of incomes, and without giving the right incentives to the agents of production.
There is now a growing realisation that there are limits to construction of social welfare networks when growth is stunted, the population is aging and competition is getting tougher.
Adherence to the old outworn orthodoxies have stunted growth, the degree of erosion being most dramatic in the tourist sector. All of this makes it difficult for the PN to reinvent itself.
Zigzags and u-turns
It is easy to cling to time-honoured notions of solidarity and subsidiarity. But latter-day Christian Democrats are wont to realise that various other political newcomers have stolen their clothes. On the other hand, changing
policies that involve zigzags and u-turns have eroded the credibility of the Nationalist Party.
To capture the mood of the times, the Nationalist Party has tried to come to terms with the exigencies of the market. It made noises about restructuring, while it promoted a progressively fierce tax regime. At the same time, PN diehards have been unwilling or unable to exorcise themselves and give their party a credible image.
Parties that persist in conserving skeletons in their cupboards, and sweeping the accumulated dust under the carpet, are condemned to wait until a new generation comes on the scene to mesmerise the new electorate with its siren songs. But the number of electors who nowadays allow themselves to be lured by sirens is shrinking fast.
Wave of the future
Fashions change, and in democracies alternative forces take over from each other. It is said that when William Gladstone pitched into the Tories with one of his great radical reforms (seeking to open up the franchise to working men), he rebuked his critics and reduced them to silence with the words: “You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side”.
In Britain, the Labour Party fought the future for the best part of a quarter-of-a-century until they reached the point of reconciling themselves with it.
The lesson, which is written large on the wall of Maltese contemporary
politics, is that the wave of the future is not necessarily the same wave with which we were familiar in the past. It could very well be – it is highly probable – that a new alternative will emerge.
The alternative force of the future will have to struggle to emerge, and the struggle may be quite a fascinating spectacle.
New thinking
The alternative force has to overcome visible and not so visible difficulties. It is not simply a question of closing its ranks and finding new faces to fill all its front rank positions. There are more important barriers that have to be deftly negotiated.
What assurances does the Labour Party propose to offer to those electors who have staked their savings by investing them in government stocks, or have joined the share-holding community? They run into thousands, and all of them have a vested interest in the soundness of the economy. Granted that the Labour Party has no reservations in recognising the electorate’s sovereign option for EU membership, how does it propose to promote the electorate’s acquired EU membership rights, and, in particular, such rights that have been allowed to fall in jeopardy by the PN administration?
As far as the PN is concerned, it is not enough to reorganise, re-equip and revamp its internal party administration, if its leaders behave like latter-day Bourbons, unable to break the old mould of bureaucratised control, to open itself up to new approaches as distinct from simulated new thinking.
What is needed are new ideas, not structures; new initiatives, not gimmicks. There must a break from the sentimental assumption that what matters most is the survival of the Nationalist Party, and not the economy and the Maltese people.
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