It’s not our business to do much of what we are doing. We must get back to basics: our base is the middle class – no more, no less. That is whom we must really focus on.
The caller was a top official in an important non-governmental financial institution. He has always voted PN but is not a member of the party. Yet he is close to the top levels of the party, without however losing any of his fiercely independent views. His business contacts bring him in contact with a number of like-minded people, all within the mover and shaker sectors of Maltese society.
People like him tend to fall into two classes. Some say you can’t win all the time and the PN has had a good run anyway and now needs to recoup and recover its losses. As Ryan Giggs said when Man Utd lost the Champions League final, a defeat gives you a huge hunger to claw your way back.
Others, and my caller falls in this category, feel there is no need for all the trauma of a defeat. The party in government must get its priorities right, right back. Identifying with the needs, the aspirations, the anger, even, of the middle class should be such an integral part of the party’s DNA that no questions would be needed. Instead, the party in government, as amply explained in the past weeks, has managed to hurt precisely this wide sector of our society.
Let’s backtrack a bit. Sociologically, it probably makes less sense today to speak of a middle class that is a buffer between the upper middle class, let alone an upper class, and the working class. There should be a whole corpus of studies that plot the sociological evolution of the Maltese over the past decades or so. It would seem that the middle class has grown bigger and the working class, though it still exists, probably wider than we think, is still there.
Over the years, the identification of the middle class with Labour has increased. The EP election this year has seen Labour make big inroads into the middle class, mainly by identifying with middle class concerns, anxieties, and aspirations. Hence the urging by my friend and his friends: if PN wants to survive, and thrive, it must get back to identify with middle class concerns. However, apart from any other consideration, it makes sense that, as large swathes of the working class made their way up the social ladder and became middle class, they still remained Labour voters. As the number of Labour middle class voters increased so too the party lost its prevalent working class colour and adopted more and more the hues of the middle class.
Labour has also more or less consciously moved towards the centre of Maltese politics. The EP election, with more PL candidates from a very clear middle class, blessed this move. Which left PN edged out, uncertain of its voter base, uncertain of its tenets, uncertain whom it actually represents.
It was not helped, such was the confusion under which the campaign was conducted (there were at least seven different hands doing seven different things in the campaign), by the complete confusion over what its ‘tapestry of candidates’ meant to voters.
Re-appropriating the middle ground and winning back the middle class is not an easy task. Perhaps it might also turn out to be just a little bit too late. Certainly, the policies followed by the present government over the past year or so have hurt mainly the middle class. It voted overwhelmingly for EU accession but has seen its purchasing power decrease. As the government struggled, in vain, to reduce the country’s fiscal deficit, who ended up paying more taxes, more charges, more everything, but the middle class? Prices increased across the board while wages and salaries did not. Promised improvements in roads were delayed in coming, healthcare improvement saw a mastodontic new hospital with the ingrained suspicion that it will require a far greater budget to man it.
Prices of essential objects are higher in Malta than in other countries and inflation continues to be higher than the European average, apparently fuelled by market imperfections in Malta, untackled by the government. And, in the cruellest of ironies, when EU laws made it clear that VAT paid on car registration tax is illegal, and this could be a clear signal that with EU membership things would get better, a hard-pressed government decided to fight a legal battle to retain it and shamed the Labour leader who organised a class action to claw it back. Who was the champion of the middle class then?
Fashioned in the template of a micro-managing prime minister, the smaller Cabinet is a Cabinet of doers with nary a thinker among them. They manage, they do things. Talk to them and they tend to speak about what they intend to do, for they all have their projects and initiatives. But many of them tend to forget they also run not just ministries but also departments. Many actually take steps to keep the departments they run away from the ministry, or the other way round. They have set up customer service structures in all ministries but mostly use them to foster constituency support. If you fall in the minister’s district, you can get help. If not, you might not. Having fewer ministers also means fewer networks of constituents to please.
Unconsciously accepting all the above limitations, the party in government tried to divert attention to what it considered the flaws in the LP position. But such strategies did not work, not even the legitimate question why the Labour leadership had masked its personal interest in the car registration tax issue. Nor the tribal appeal to the PN grassroots at a time of less confrontational politics.
If PN allows itself to lose the coming general election it may also kiss goodbye to the middle class. This happened in the 1970s but Labour threw away its huge advantage thanks to Dom Mintoff’s ham-fisted administration. It can happen again and Labour this time may be too canny to lose the middle ground.
What led PN to power in 1987 was the demand by the middle class for signal improvement after the 1980s mismanaged austerity. What led it again to power in 2003 was the battle for EU accession, a primarily middle-class aspiration. What is PN promising now to the middle classes?
Time and again, the party in government loses track of its wide aims in its efforts to micro-manage the economy. This is a holy battle, but not if left to the mercies of an accounting mentality. It was the PN Opposition that accused the Sant government of using a calculator to dictate policies and no now it is doing just that.
Looking at things like this, it would be easy to decide that things pass, and maybe the Nationalist Party has had its time, like other institutions before and maybe after it. That would be a fatalist approach. One thing that has not been mentioned here but maybe is the only, or main, issue in some people’s minds, is retaining power. In any such occurrence, this is the issue that should matter least, though it is too idealistic to think that.
If the PN wants to continue existing, it must invent a new reason for its existence. No longer an ideological reason or a confessional reason exists for its continued existence. It can still express the aspirations and ideals of the middle class, though Labour is actively campaigning for this same constituency.
Getting the country’s finances back in order is an absolute imperative but so too is ensuring growth, getting the country’s governing structures to really, really work, and delivering to the country, and not just the middle class, the kind of country people would like it to be.