Being away from the seat of power tells. As Andreotti used to retort to those who used to tell him “Il potere logora” by adding “Chi non c’e l’ha” – power tires those who do not have it.
It will take far more than it has taken so far to transform the Labour Party from a party, which time and again believes it will win only to be some hundreds of votes short, to a party that effectively succeeds to overcome the mythical majority vote benchmark.
Just as in companies that are failing to make their mark in the marketplace there will always be those – accountants, technicians, union leaders – who all tell you their pet ideas to get the company moving, only to find their so-called ideas will actually do more damage to an already-damaged company, so too in a political party that time and again has failed to make the mark. (One will probably find this kind of people also in the winning party but the quality of the leadership shows by the way they refuse to allow themselves to be pushed into corners).
The more time one spends away from exercising real power the more unreal will one’s grasp of reality become; the more one becomes subject to pressures and/or phobias, the more one tends to choose policy options that in the end will turn out to be counter-productive.
Friday’s party conference, and all that accompanied it before and after, is a textbook case. The party has now become like Pavlov’s dog: it thinks it is being smart by outguessing what the hated Nationalists want it to do by doing the opposite when that is precisely the name of the (Nationalists’) game.
All that happened on Friday is understandable and could be seen coming. To extrapolate from the immediate partisan scene, the same would have happened in any context of power if it were asked to relinquish power in favour of those at the very bottom of the scale. Think of any established church, for instance. Can anyone even imagine a priesthood asking to divest itself of its powers in favour of a laity, for instance? To the keepers of the Grail that must have been the ultimate insult, so no wonder the aggressiveness in some of Friday’s speeches.
All that was needed to ensure the party goes this way rather than that was by creating a siege mentality, thus transmuting the still raw anger at being pipped at the post by a few hundred votes when the party was led to believe the election was in the bag, to resentment that the government is bulldozing its way around. To this add the government’s insensitivity and also naivety in making offers that turn out to be a shoddy con, such as the choice of Speaker from Labour’s one seat disadvantage, even if that offer may have been done in all genuineness. Add the government’s Brussels-pushed move to join the PfP without any consultation. And the government’s playing into the hands of the Opposition as regards pairing.
At the back of the delegates’ minds, of course, there was the upcoming leadership elections and, in a way, the way the vote went can lead one to foresee where the leadership battle will go in a month’s time. A month may be a long time in politics, however and Joe Muscat’s commitment to issue a public call for applications for the filling of government boards is just as naïve as George Abela’s claim that the party leader should be chosen by the membership. Can you imagine: Calls for applications to sit on the Air Malta board will be accepted by such and such a date? Queue this side please. Again, power tires those who do not have it.
It is then the acme of illogic to have Jason Micallef state that the decision not to enfranchise the party membership was “an excellent exercise in democracy”. Why the election of the leader has to be restricted to the party’s priesthood beats all logic, even though one understands that the priesthood of its own accord will never relinquish that power. Americans, who outnumber us by quite a few millions, choose their leaders by consulting the party members in primaries and, though they sometimes get things wrong as in the Florida ballots, they usually manage to get it.
True, the Nationalist Party also chooses its leader by means of its delegates (in its case it calls them councillors but the fact remains the same) and the councillors would certainly reject out of hand any bid to take that decision out of their hands. But then the Nationalist Party has won all the past six elections bar one and so can afford not to tamper with things. Again, had Labour won on 8 March, we would not be here discussing this exercise in enfranchising or disenfranchising. The winner is always right.
Having now solved the issue, and having almost chosen the next leader, Labour would be very mistaken to think that it has all its work cut out for it. Apart, as was made clear on Friday, from giving all sort of ammunition to government sympathisers to put the spotlight on the shenanigans inside Labour rather than on what the government is doing, the whole issue facing Labour is not who the man (woman) on top is and which clan is the top clan, but what kind of policy choices it will make.
Whatever the commissioned report on the election defeat will say, two things are clear: Labour approached the election with a dearth of broad policies and with some half-baked policies that did not lead it to widen its base. That is where the real battlefield is.