In 2004, the PN was looking for a new leader – as it is today.
That time, the battle between Lawrence Gonzi and John Dalli was hard-fought and bitter, and the animosity that it led to dragged on for several years and still persists today. There was a third candidate, Louis Galea, but he was never involved that much in the hostility between the other two, during or after the election.
The antagonism brought about by the 2004 leadership race was, with hindsight, the start of the internal strife within the Nationalist Party. Factions started forming, and Lawrence Gonzi found himself leader of a party that was breaking up. As the years passed, he was attacked from all quarters within his own organisation, and could only really trust the few people who were closest to him.
The country moved forward briskly, and as Prime Minister, Dr Gonzi was successful in keeping Malta very much afloat in spite of the troubled waters it faced. But in the meantime, as PN leader he continued to struggle with an unprecedented barrage from people who were technically on his side, but who were his sworn enemies – to a much greater extent than the Labour Party – and who ended up celebrating with the latter after the last election.
The Nationalist Party is to elect its new leader in the coming days, the one who will replace Dr Gonzi. But the situation seems to be very different from the one we had nine years ago. Although, rightly so, each of the four candidates are doing their best to convince the 900 Nationalist councillors to vote for him, they are all doing so with fairness and respect towards the other contestants.
Simon Busuttil, Mario de Marco, Francis Zammit Dimech and Ray Bugeja all want to win, but they want to win on their own merits and for what they are proposing. I have followed the campaign closely and I have not come across one single moment in which, publicly, any of the four contestants has denigrated one of the other three. It is the cleanest campaign for a party leader that we have ever had.
It is highly unlikely that the first vote on Saturday will produce the winner, as it is highly improbable that any one of the four will get the required 66.6 per cent of votes needed. But we will surely get an indication of where the wind is blowing.
Still, there is one matter that should not be overlooked in all this. There are many points of convergence in what the four contestants are proposing, and this is a good platform on which the future of the Nationalist Party could be built. For one thing, all are in agreement that the party should be restructured in such a way as to separate its political and commercial aspects; the appointment of a chief executive officer is seen as a way of doing this.
It may have taken quite a long time for the PN to realise that it is no longer just a political party, but one that also to have its commercial side administered in a professional way to avoid a repetition of the financial difficulties it is currently experiencing. It may have been a bitter pill to swallow to copy the Labour Party in this respect, when the PN had ridiculed Labour for creating a CEO post five years ago and continuously attacked it as being a clone of the PN. But it is also good when a party realises its own shortcomings and corrects them.
By having similar thoughts and aspirations, the contestants may not be offering a particularly wide choice. Many councillors are still in two minds as to whom they should vote for, and this is simply because the difference between them is hardly discernible. Of course, they have different backgrounds and experiences – their pluses and minuses – but at the end of the day their ideas for the way forward for the party are very much alike.
This should make it easier, when the contest is over, for the party to begin its new chapter on a sounder footing. This lack of contrast between the contestants for the leadership – which is creating so much difficulty for the councillors over deciding who to vote for – should then translate into a much smoother start of a new era for the PN.
Once the subsequent elections for the deputy leader and secretary-general are over, the party can then get its machine going – and the quicker it manages to do so, the better it is for the PN itself and for the country in general. The Labour Party underwent the same procedures after it lost the 2008 election, but it derived strength from the fact that it managed to get itself going under its new leader quickly.
It was helped in its quest to return to power by the fact that, as said earlier, the PN was no longer a united party, despite its 2008 win. This is a weakness that the PN will not find in the PL now, and Dr Muscat – who has a much easier task to manage a 35,000 win (as opposed to one of a mere 1,500) – still seems to be very much in control of what is going on within the party structures.
Right now, the PN is in a vacuum. And this transition period is proving to be quite handy for the Labour government because, strictly speaking, it has no Opposition to contend with. The PN has been critical of a number of decisions that have been taken by the Labour government, but it is still to find its feet and has been rather timid.
Until this process is completed, the PN cannot be the Opposition that the country needs in its democratic context.
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