The Nationalist Party is trying to lay a trap for the Labour Party. But the PL has so far resisted the temptation to play along. It does not want to repeat what it did in the previous term, and give the PN the ammunition with which the Nationalists shot Labour down.
For months on end, perhaps since the time Joseph Muscat was elected PL leader soon after the 2008 election, the Nationalists have been trying to force the Labour Party to put its cards on the table in the hope that the PN will be able to pick up the Joker.
The Prime Minister, as well as other top PN officials, has often attempted to provoke Dr Muscat into saying what Labour has in mind if and when it is elected to government.
When Dr Muscat refuses to reveal anything, saying that the time is not yet ripe and that Labour is working on an election manifesto, which will be made public just before the election, the PN accuses Labour of not having ideas how to govern, and that it simply wants to have the power without knowing how it will use it. So far, Dr Muscat has not wavered from the position he has taken, and he has kept his cards close to his chest.
These PN provocations have increased in the past few months, and I believe this strategy has been used to try to shift the focus on Labour at a time when the Nationalists’ popularity is very low. When the Nationalists messed up badly on the honoraria and divorce issues, they tried to deflect the negative attention they were getting on to Labour, attempting to expose it as a party which has no clue how to run the country.
Recent statements made by the PN have had one common factor – that Labour is not to be trusted with the country’s administration simply because they do not know how to go about it. If Labour had been in government, these PN statements say, Malta would have collapsed under the weight of the challenges that it has had to face.
Their specific target is Dr Muscat, and no opportunity is lost by the PN to describe him as someone who would have run the country into the ground in the economic recession that the whole world has experienced, and probably still is.
The PN feels it is safe to argue on the economy, because Malta has not fared as badly as other countries did in the global recession. And so it tries to portray Dr Muscat as someone who would not have been able to handle the delicate situation as well as the PN has done.
The Nationalists are dying to push Dr Muscat to say something similar to what has become known as the repeater class just before the last election. That time, under former leader Alfred Sant, Labour had come up with the idea of a transition class between primary and secondary schooling, giving students an extra year in which to prepare themselves better for secondary education. Or so Labour thought.
It was soon turned by the Nationalists into a “repeater class”, and used as a weapon to convince the electorate that a Labour government was once again tampering with the education system – a sector the PN knew would strike a chord with voters, especially the older ones, given Labour’s poor credentials in the 1980s. There is no proof for what I’m going to say, but I believe that the “repeater class” issue was one of the major issues that helped tip the balance slightly in favour of the PN in March 2008.
The Labour Party has realised that the less it speaks and the less it proposes the better. It will not come up with another “repeater class”-type suggestion that the PN tore apart, and what the PN hopes for now.
The Labour Party has steered clear from anything that could backfire. It is always present in the media – lately we have seen a surge in the number of press conferences addressed by Labour spokesmen on a wide array of subjects – but that’s just about it.
Their tactics have been pretty obvious. What Dr Muscat says, and what party spokesmen say, is criticism of what the government is doing. If there is a hint of a scandal, it goes on and on about it until it is perceived as the truth. If the PL realises it has scored points – such as what happened with the BWSC and honoraria stories – it mentions them at every opportunity.
But the PL has willingly chosen not to propose anything. It does not want to attract any attention to it. It does not want to have its ideas discussed. It prefers to have the government’s failures grabbing the headlines.
Right now, the Labour Party wants the focus to remain on the government – because the government (and the Nationalist Party) is giving itself enough rope with which to hang itself, and the party as well
The Labour Party knows that it is the favourite to win the next election. And this is so not because of what it will or will not propose, but because the Nationalist Party has been there for too long. Therefore it has nothing to gain through its proposals; if anything, it stands to lose if one or more such proposals end up being butchered by the PN and its allies, as happened in the previous term.
I will not be surprised if Labour’s election manifesto will be a very vague document that does not go into the specifics so as to avoid the potential damage caused by possible wrong moves, or moves the PN can pick on to attack Labour’s credentials.
Of course, the PN is banking on Labour to come up with a silly suggestion such as the “repeater class”.
It might be the only way the PN could win again.
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