The national outpouring of emotion at the sudden death of Guido de Marco, and the crowd outside PN headquarters yesterday morning, only served to highlight the transitory nature of politics in our country.
There, grouped around Eddie Fenech Adami, were the dinosaurs of Maltese politics, the old guard mourning one of its own, the redoubtable Guido as the crowd called him yesterday as on so many other occasions in the distant past.
Looking at them, especially the quadrumvirate Eddie, Guido, Ugo and Louis Galea, one saw a Nationalist Party born out of pain, fear and courage.
They found a dispirited and split party after the defeat in 1971 and the trouncing in 1976 and rebuilt it anew, changing its perspectives considerably. That, the George Borg Olivier generation, was the one that had led Malta to independence and which would have built the newly-independent state to a conservative, capitalist future had it not foundered under Dom Mintoff’s onslaught, the rise of a people which judged it had not gained anything from independence except job losses at the dockyard, and of course peace with the church which removed the mediaeval 1961 condemnations.
But George Borg Olivier was afraid of changing his team – he famously said that one does not change horses in mid-stream. Around him he had a team which, with one or two exceptions, was not up to his level, a team of mainly aged people who did not inspire followers, especially the young drunk on the heady freedom of national independence.
George Borg Olivier’s government collapsed before it lost. Its time had run out but it was the last to realise it.
Matters looked even worse after the 1971 election defeat, when Dom Mintoff introduced so many changes – kicking out the last British Governor General, NATO, the whole saga of brinkmanship in his negotiations with Britain over the bases ‘rent’ and then, the most important change, the 1974 Constitutional amendment that practically caused a split in the Nationalist Party.
But then, and after the burning down of so many party clubs after the 1976 election, and with Dr Borg Olivier resisting every push to oust him, that united the party against him and he was forced to give in.
That is where the quadrumvirate came in. There was no bridge between one team and the other – although maybe Censu Tabone was one. But the drive came from the four. They were the ones who upped the confrontation, who stood up for the many who by now were regularly downtrodden by the Mintoff and Lorry Sant regime. They changed the party’s mood from angry submission given to splurges of hatred to an ongoing hardening of attitudes across the board.
Then, when in the 1981 election Labour won the seats but PN won the votes and later, when Labour crazily picked a fight with the church regarding church schools and hospitals and the Blue Sisters went away and the schools closed, everything played into the PN’s hands. The quadrumvirate was strengthened, and any pocket of Borg Olivier clones removed.
By the time the 1987 election had come along, after such episodes as shooting at people in Rabat, Zebbug and of course Tal-Barrani, the Raymond Caruana killing, the Pietru Pawl Busuttil frame-up, there was no stopping the PN bulldozer, even though at the end the margin of victory in 1987 was a slender one.
The quadrumvirate was in power; its battle had been won; it had brought to an end the 16-year spell in the wilderness.
But Eddie, the main thrust behind the rollercoaster, pushed to a new level – membership of the EU. Two terms later, when a fresh and promising Alfred Sant looked like a better choice against a jaded and tired government, when the people were not that attracted by the EU magnetism and when the EU itself had not been overly enthused about the idea of Malta joining, the dream looked like having lost.
But then Sant’s mistakes, and an unlikely alliance between Dom Mintoff and the PN’s old lions, broke the government down and forced an early election that the EU aura won. I remember using as the main headline for the paper the day after the election ‘Bonjour Europe’.
By then the quadrumvirate had broken down and it was mainly Eddie who battled on against terrible odds and helped by the EU aura.
Those were indeed giants. Compared to them, today’s leaders are pygmies. Just as there was only one possible transitional link between the Borg Olivier Cabinet and the Eddie team, so too there is only one real link that offers continuity from the quadrumvirate’s time to today’s Cabinet and that is Austin Gatt, who was, like Guido, the party’s secretary-general in those days. Louis Galea is out. John Dalli is out. Francis Zammit Dimech and others are backbenchers. And Lawrence Gonzi himself was tending to his Catholic Action devotions and private business while the quadrumvirate was facing bullets at Tal-Barrani. Today’s ministers are new men and women.
Nowhere was the generational shift so pronounced as at Pieta yesterday. The old generation of lions has moved on. The new team still has to prove itself. Like children born into rich families, it came to power without struggling and most of its power is due not to itself but to those who went before it.
We are still told that Lawrence Gonzi won the 2008 election by his extraordinary hard work, but he was also the man who ‘lost’ some 15,000 votes. The EU vision, or mirage, has palled. Labour failed because, contrary to political logic, it kept the leader who had lost the 1998 and the 2003 elections (to say nothing of the 2003 referendum).
As things stand, the ‘pygmy government’ is due for a drubbing next time around. It has no vision to offer. Its run has collected a series of mishaps, policy reversals, bad choices and wrong tactics. More importantly, it has completely lost sight of the EU vision of the redoubtable quadrumvirate. There has not been the sensible upgrade in people’s lives – the springtime – they were offered.
As pomp and circumstance take over tomorrow at the State funeral and yesterday’s crowd of genuinely grieving supporters give way to officialdom and today’s leaders take their front row seats, they should use the time to consider that they may never aspire to the expression of a task done well that has been the leit-motif of the Guido funeral.
This is not to say that they cannot rise to the occasion, though many doubt it. But they collectively seem to think leadership of a country is an easy task and that taking decisions is simple. They do not seem to realise how far they have removed themselves from the real people. That is something Eddie never did, something Guido never did, or the rest. The new pygmies have embraced technology as if it is a substitute for policy. True, they have followed the “Lm10 million here, Lm10 million there” Eddie.
They have hard work, much hard work, awaiting them after this summer’s interrupted holiday. Just basing their hopes on the completion of landmark public projects will not be enough, much though there is something in each one of us that still believes public works are uplifting.
The Malta we see around us, the Malta clamouring for a resolution of the divorce dilemma, the Malta of changing lifestyles, the Malta of increasing opportunities, the Malta of growth in unexpected areas and stagnation in others, the Malta where so much needs to be done, where so many social problems persist and even increase – this Malta and more is earnestly clamouring for a unifying vision. Only when and if they find one, will today’s born yesterday leaders stop being pygmies.
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