As he takes the podium to address the Nationalist Party’s General Council today, Lawrence Gonzi may be inclined to do a song and a dance, if, improbably, were he so inclined.
The rupture brought about by the divorce debate and referendum is now firmly in the past and no lasting damage seems to have been caused to the party’s standing.
More damage was caused by the cack-handed way of the Arriva launch and the anger it aroused in the Maltese and visitors who were left waiting in the sun, sometimes for hours.
And there was that €500 a week rise awarded to ministers at a time of general austerity.
But order inside the party has been restored, not without a shock of two – JPO’s gunning for the divorce referendum and Franco Debono’s issues during the recent Opposition-sponsored debate on the Arriva debacle.
At no point was Lawrence Gonzi’s standing as leader of the party and of the country shaken. The vote of confidence he himself asked for was never in doubt. He has part-relieved Austin Gatt of any Arriva supervision, just as he did with George Pullicino over Mepa. He did not lose George then and he is not likely to lose Austin now.
He has however lost John Dalli who has become a bitter critic.
He is facing a very weak Opposition, at odds with itself, whose leader (at least this side of tomorrow’s speech) seems incapable of taking a clear position about most things, and whose deputies have become a laughing stock, the harder they try.
As he surveys all this from the podium, Lawrence Gonzi will no doubt try his best not to crow: it is not his style. But at no time since he was elected party leader and prime minister on a cold Saturday night in February 2004 has he been as solidly in power as he is now.
Two other factors have contributed greatly.
The Libya uprising turned a politician into a statesman. Initially cautious to ask for Gaddafi’s ousting, he let his ethical standards rip and took the high moral ground even when it suited many Maltese businessmen that Malta become an apologist for Gaddafi and provide a possible safe passage out of Libya for his henchmen. He took over the evacuation of foreign nationals out of Libya and slowly built a special rapport with the new NTC guys.
He has been deeply involved throughout the year in the European Council deliberations about the future of the eurozone. He has seen the faces around the table change – no more Papadopoulos, no more Irish Prime Minister, or the Portuguese one, and as from today no more Zapatero, and of course no more Berlusconi. Slowly he is moving in the wake of Jean-Claude Juncker as one of the senior members of the council.
Under his guidance, Malta has moved steadily to become a Northerner in the Med, and while its finances are still not this side of virtuousness he, and we, can look with some smugness at the disasters around us, from Cyprus to Italy, from Spain to Greece. We need to worry about the impact of such crises on our tourist intake, our export markets, but not so much on the Maltese economy itself.
Last Monday’s Budget, in as much as it told us about the state of the country’s economy, also gave us the good news that our country’s public deficit will at last be under the Maastricht criteria levels this year. Whether the economy will achieve the progress Minister Fenech said it would next year remains to be seen. My feeling is that he was being quite optimistic. But I remember saying the same thing last year and it looks as if the country did in fact get below the Maastricht level.
There is still a year and some months to go before the next election, but I am sure that the Prime Minister, as he contemplates all from the podium this morning will be sorely tempted to go to the country earlier. Things have never been looking so rosy as they look now. And he may also catch the Opposition unawares.
Opinion polls, such as they are in a small country like ours, tell many stories and one does not know which one is to believe. The parties themselves have their own polls and will be looking closely at them.
From a cross-section of the polls that have been published, it would seem that PN is down in the 20s, and Labour up in the 30s. But some polls favour Dr Gonzi more than Dr Muscat while a few others give a contrary result.
Still, there is one certain factor in all this: the Labour supporters tend to be tribal and congregate around their battle standards all the time – One TV, Orizzont, etc – while the Nationalist supporters tend to get on with their lives and only bother about politics when the election drumbeat begins.
The last time, in November 2007, the public climate was far worse. Dr Muscat may have gathered all the Labour personages kept in the shade by Dr Sant but that has not enhanced the party one bit. On the contrary, Labour under Sant at that moment, just before he unfortunately fell sick, was far stronger than Labour is today with all the old battleaxes back in action. (Labour’s deputy leaders then were also better).
We were about to join the eurozone on 1 January, but the Gonzi team in its first legislature was weak and incoherent, which was why he shook most of his team off as soon as he won the election.
Since then he has suffered odd brickbats by those he forced out, and more so from those he did not allow at the trough. The coming election will be a cleaning out of the stables, both the old war horses and the young who have not made their mark. And mostly those who publicly rocked the boat.
Who will take their place? Soon the hustings will open for the March local council elections. This is the first time the parties field new candidates. The process of trying to approach well-known people to become general election candidates has already started (though we have yet to see Deborah Schembri acting as a real PL candidate).
I blame Dr Gonzi for not trying and testing some of the valid people he has on the backbench with the management of departments. Their role as parliamentary assistants has been mostly relegated to stand-in roles at occasions the minister cannot bring himself to go to. I would still love to see if they can fulfil any effective role in the decision-taking process, in the preparation of policy stances and the like.
Unless, that is, he intends to soldier on with an ever-diminishing band until, like the goddess Kali, he ends up with a half-a-dozen hands doing it all by himself.
Time and again, Dr Gonzi has suffered from his own main weakness – short sightedness, timely plug-ins, escamotages. He sorely lacks strategic thinking and he does not have anyone to make up for this shortfall, not even from within his own Cabinet.
The question to ask now is: where does he intend to take the country? What vision does he intend to promote to the electorate? In the last election it was all about Vision 2015. Then the EU made him and the other leaders speak of Vision 2020, which blurred the issue.
Three years from 2015, there is no sign of Vision 2015. And one key component, eco-Gozo, is just a series of initiatives planned by the ministry, and all seem that they will be concluded, miraculously, in time for the 2013 election. There is nothing essentially ecological about them.
One warning I must not forget: there is in the Nationalist DNA a yearning for glory projects and we have a surfeit of them coming up – City Gate and the new Parliament, the old-new Opera House, the Lift, the Ċirkewwa terminal, the three or five major currently ongoing road works, Villa Rundle in Gozo.
These have a double-edged effect – on the one hand, the supporters feel up in the high heavens when they see them happening, but on the other hand those whose minimum wage makes them work harder to cope with the bills get really angry about such projects. Especially glory projects that do not help anyone at all.
Likewise, it would be very foolish to dwell on the coming high moments to be enjoyed by the next administration – the Presidency of the EU, Capital City of Culture, and so on. The many coming centenaries.
That is not the strategy the Maltese want to hear about. Maybe we still do not really appreciate our good fortune compared to other economies. Maybe we are not aware of the respect that Malta enjoys from Brussels to Tripoli. Maybe we are not aware why companies relocate here or why there are so many (white, Caucasian) around and what they are doing here.
That’s still too negative. The last time someone told his people “You’ve never had it so good” (Macmillan in the 1960s) he promptly lost the election.
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