Both the Nationalist Party and the Malta Labour Party are seeking a kind of renewal after the election. Both are also going about this change in different ways.

The electoral win has given the Nationalist Party peace of mind, and it is natural that, as winners, their leadership has not been contested.

Lawrence Gonzi was re-appointed leader and Tonio Borg was re-confirmed as deputy leader during a general conference held last weekend. But the party will still undergo a major upheaval in the weeks to come, as the administration will be changed from top to bottom in a bid for the party to renew itself.

General secretary Joe Saliba has already announced that he will not be seeking a re-appointment, while the PN’s information officer Gordon Pisani has already moved to pastures new, having been appointed head of communications in the Office of the Prime Minister.

As Mr Saliba himself explained over the weekend, the party must not become complacent and must continuously strive to renew itself. The PN knows that it scraped through the election with the slimmest of margins largely because the Malta Labour Party was weaker than it should have been after so many years in opposition.

The situation will be much different in five years’ time when the people will be asked to vote again. And this is why the PN – to be able to stand a chance of an unlikely fourth victory in a row – must show that it is still a “new” party. A “new” party is led by “new” people, and this is why the PN is doing the right thing in changing its administrative foundations, after having changed the leadership four years ago.

It is a different story for the Malta Labour Party, which is also seeking to renew itself through the appointment of a new leadership, in their case a party leader and two deputy leaders.

The MLP has chosen to take the long way, preferring not to rush into making hasty decisions and taking a full three months to elect its new leaders after the electoral defeat. Whether the election of the new leadership will be followed by changes in the administration is a thing that still needs to be seen.

Last Friday, MLP delegates voted to leave things as they are – retaining the right to vote for the new leadership, without opening up the process to include party paid-up members.

It was not a surprise that they did so; if anything, the surprise was the predominant vote against the motion that was being proposed. Four out of every five delegates voted to keep the status quo, and these same delegates will now be voting to elect the new leadership in three weeks’ time.

They will have an important decision to make on 5 June. The five contenders for the post of party leader are currently bombarding them with their ideas as to how they will run the party. But delegates should be looking beyond that too.

A change of a leader is already a renewal in itself. When it elects its new leader, the MLP will already be making a statement to the people. The MLP should however take the opportunity of this change to start portraying itself in a different way than it has done over the past years.

Political parties that do not renew themselves stand little chance of winning the electorate’s support. And both the Nationalist Party and the Malta Labour Party must already start planning for 2013. Five years seem a long time, but the decisions that will be taken in the coming weeks will play an important part in the outcome of the 2013 election.