Still very much in shock at the election defeat and its absolutely amazing result, the Nationalist grass roots keep grasping at straws, waiting for a miracle that can put the clock back to last February when the sun was still shining and all was well with the world.

After weeks, months, of living in denial, the pendulum swung to the opposite extreme – believing that come next spring, the Nationalist candidates will sweep everything in front of them at the European Parliament election when they will redress the balance.

Hence the eagerness with which they are preparing themselves to find candidates to promote, and maybe too the eagerness with which some would-be candidates are spreading the word around.

They are not realising what a hard uphill struggle they face.

The March 2013 general election was a real watershed in Maltese politics: never has any party turned the tables in such a massive way. An entire generation of people who had voted PN all their lives broke ranks and voted Labour. And the chances are that, however much the Opposition media cry to high heavens about the Labour government’s political appointees, about policemen acting as waiters, about Mepa being turned into a developers’ rubberstamp, the chances are that come next spring a good proportion of those who voted Labour in March 2013 will have not found reason to regret their vote.

There are thus all the reasons why the Nationalist Party and its new leaders must resist getting carried away with facile optimism and instead work hard and choose well.

The party leadership has now appointed a commission, led by former commissioner Joe Borg, to help choose the candidates for the EP. The following are some ideas and suggestions I feel like making today.

First of all, I believe, the commission should propose only party members. In past elections, the party also included external candidates taken from civil society. I think it was a wrong strategy and the results seem to have confirmed this. The party must have, and continually provide itself with, wave after wave of budding politicians instead of relying on externals. More on this later.

Secondly, it must be the party to approach people rather than people proposing themselves or offering themselves as candidates. Labour does not act like that, I know, and various people have been announcing in various ways, they intend to be candidates. But at this stage of things, there are serious reasons why the PN cannot just allow any Tom, Dick or Harry to become candidates and risk losing votes, apart from giving out mixed messages to its electorate.

It was reported over the past days that Lawrence Gonzi does not want to be an EP candidate, which is a huge pity. He enjoys huge respect in Europe and would have greatly increased Malta’s presence there. There are precedents for past prime ministers to go to the EP – Latvia comes to mind, but there may be others as well. I have often written that unfortunately we have no Upper House and former statesmen have nowhere to go and give the benefit of their experience. The EP could be one such place. It is also the reason why I believe that Eddie Fenech Adami, if he puts his mind to it and is willing and able to do it, would be another great MEP.

There could also be scope for a former minister or two, now that they are out of office. As ministers, they were used to a very hectic lifestyle with travel all the time. Now that they are free of that, many of them would not be very happy with the life in the slow lane that electoral fortunes have plunged them into.

Besides, in varying degrees, they have grown used to the big EU issues and some of them, George Pullicino comes to mind, have established and retained personal contacts with people in the big EPP group all over Europe. Such personal contacts and networking are very important tools in today’s Europe.

As for the rest, unelected candidates, etc there are many factors to consider.

First of all, they must be more than savvy, more than au courant with EU theory and practice. Here, the party is at an immense disadvantage because in the past years it has neglected to train people for Europe despite the many opportunities on offer, from the EPP itself in particular. Maybe, some will reply, the people who were well trained in EU practice were working in the Representation. Those days are over now and the party now has to begin from scratch, or almost.

One must also point out here that for some reason or other, most Maltese MEPs do not seem to have Maltese on their Brussels staffs. Maybe this too points to another disadvantage other people do not seem to suffer from.

Secondly, candidates must understand that working in EU and in the EP is extremely expensive on family life if on nothing else. The present MEPs seem to have coped, but it is no joke to live two days in Malta and five in Brussels apart from other travel.

Maybe I should not say this but the commission must be wary of those who might be looking at the good packages the MEPs enjoy.

The commission’s remit, as I understand it, regards the EP election only but probably on that very same day we will also have the local council elections. Here too, on 9 March, the party lost councils it had come to think were its own by right.

Over the past years, the local councils have become a worthy introduction to politics. Labour, in particular, trained young people for this role and after some years they graduated to Parliament, as some PN ex-mayors did. But the tsunami that swept Lawrence Gonzi from power has undermined the PN power base and it now needs restructuring from the ground upwards.

Does the party have a second line of failed candidates, would-be candidates, etc? I believe it has but they are still deeply hurt and disgruntled for having served as backfill at the innumerable election campaign meetings without anything more substantial being asked of them. This cohort now requires careful handling and nurturing and I am not sure that a commission can do that.

The party still needs to examine the details of the March results and I am not sure the Ann Fenech report did that. Why is it, for instance, that one locality, Siggiewi as I remember, bucked the national trend both in the general election and in the local one too? On the contrary, were there localities that experienced a swing greater than the national one? And what are the conclusions one must derive from that?

To recapitulate, those who will be chosen have a hard, uphill slog ahead of them. The worst thing they can do to themselves, to the party and the country at large is to fill themselves with heady optimism that things will change back bloodlessly and painlessly. In the 2013 election the party badly misread the national mood, thought it could buck the trend painlessly and it could still mouth, for instance, anti-divorce platitudes when the people patently chose otherwise. Maybe since then the pendulum has swung to the other extreme and maybe too people now and in the coming months will have other issues to worry about.

But it will definitely not be easy at all to get these people to swing back without feeling they were being obliged to return to a faith they have lost.

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