It’s amazing what a different perspective can do.
Matteo Renzi, with a 40% share of the vote is portrayed as the winner.
Simon Busuttil is crucified for getting just 40% of the vote.
Numbers, numbers.
In the 2004 EP election, the Nationalist Party polled 97,688 of the 304,283 registered voters and the 250,692 that actually turned out to vote.
In 2009, it polled 100,486 votes of the 322,441 registered and the 254,039 who actually did vote.
This year, it took the votes of 99,821 electors of the 344,374 registered and the 257,588 who turned up at the voting booth.
Labour polled 118,893 in 2004, 135,917 in 2009 and 132,808 now. (Acknowledgement: DCG)
That the almost 33,000 votes more that PL polled did not avoid a 3-3 end result is due more to the proportional representation system and also due to the fact that more Labour voters just did not continue voting PL all through.
This point was forcefully made by Joseph Cuschieri on his Facebook page when he pointed out that the losses amounted to:
Fleur Vella – 15
Peter Cordina – 32
Mario Farrugia Borg – 48
Ivan Grixti – 58
Deborah Schembri – 167
Charlon Gouder – 173
Lino Bianco – 301
Joseph Cuschieri – 1025
Total: 1819
That explains the rather anomalous result.
Before the election of Therese Comodini Cachia, the mood among PN supporters was one of deepest despair. The last-minute election of Dr Comodini Cachia assuaged matters, as shown by The Times video of PN election agents jumping about and singing, signifying a huge release of tension. That feeling percolated out to the PN grassroots but only a fool would think the party has turned a corner.
The PN leader has now been reported as saying that there will be no report on this electoral defeat and he has latched on to the upswing in the party’s psyche to point forward with optimism.
On the contrary, however, there are all the reasons to analyse what went wrong for the PN and what went right for the PL.
Together with some others, I made the point over the past days that the PN vote was actually in freefall and what may have saved it was a massive abstention by critical PL supporters which masked the PN freefall.
In other words, some people who had voted PN in the 2013 general election now voted Labour maybe for the first time in their lives. Labour is no longer the ogre PN likes to portray it. There was no violence after the election and people have showed in this election they can be comfortable with a PL government.
For all the issues one can disagree with in the PL’s government policies, the government has continued with the PN’s pro-business policies and there has been no drastic turnaround in the main polices of the country.
On the contrary, PN has continued its drive to become smaller and smaller instead of appealing to the vast majority of the country. PN has become today the party of scions, dynasties – consider: the two deputy leaders are both sons of former Presidents. With their aides, the two dominate the party and have turned it into a closed group.
When Eddie Fenech Adami became party leader in 1977, it was a breath of fresh air in a party of oligarchs. This time round, the party has become fossilised.
It has yet to come to terms with modernity. This was clear already during the divorce debate and even more in the Civil Unions debate. Now, even the former party leader, who had led the front of rejection in the divorce debate, has untimely come out saying the new leader, his successor, missed giving a free vote on civil unions. The party is split between the modernisers and the ones still attached to the Church and tradition.
Beyond these generic characterisations, there are worse echoes of feuds inside the PN HQ, of a cafeteria that has not yet opened, of two lifts that have never been used, of cliques around this or that deputy leader. The Nationalists are nothing if not transparent in their self-flagellation, especially on Facebook pages.
The no-post-mortem leader has now acknowledged that the party lacks credibility. He ought also to admit his touch at the helm was very weak and that he has allowed himself to be swayed this way and that.
Two days ago, I had an angry phone call from a party insider warning me Dr Busuttil was to appoint David Casa as the leader of the three MEPs, when Mr Casa got about half the votes Roberta Metsola got. The party has also been promoting Dr Comodini Cachia as the miracle girl, again to the detriment of Dr Metsola who the party leadership seems out to circumscribe. I do not know if this is true or not, but the fact that such conclusions are aired and propagated indicates all is not well in the kingdom of Pieta.
Beppe Fenech Adami said on Xarabank he acknowledges the Panini jape was the wrong one to come out with. Funny that, I thought the folder had Dr Fenech Adami on the back.
The almost 100,000 who voted PN had quite solid reasons to do so: they agreed they did not like Joseph Muscat’s leadership of the country. There is, as there usually is, a core of voters with a visceral hatred of anything that is Labour and support of all that is PN, whoever is on top. But beyond this core, people vote for a variety of reasons.
For proof of this, if proof is indeed needed, see the Imperium Europa vote and how its votes then passed on to other parties including, and hysterically funny that, Arnold Cassola.
Beyond jokes, PN has yet to take immigration seriously. It had a knee-jerk reaction to Joe Muscat’s rash talk of push backs (in fact, this was all talk and positioning especially the recent meeting with Goodluck of Nigeria). It was strong on the humanitarian reasons why asylum seekers had to be treated as human beings. But it still fails dismally to understand what is happening at the grassroots and the abuses that have or are making some areas no go areas for Maltese, when these people seem quite adept at circumventing laws and crying abuse when they can get away with it.
The PN leader has yet to acknowledge how badly the campaign was waged, with him at the helm. When he was cornered by the Labour media on the contracts his legal office had been given by the PN government, his reaction was all over the place and weak, not to say confusing. To which he added his bit – he had worked for less than the minimum wage (at a different time). That is where his credibility as a person suffered.
His credibility as a leader suffers when he allows people in the upper echelons of the PN to permit their legal office to tender for precisely those things the party is campaigning against.
When, especially before Dr Comodini Cachia’s election, despair was rife among PN supporters, many called for a change in the leadership. (Later on in Facebook, some said these were Mario de Marco supporters out to replace him with their hero). Then Dr Busuttil himself came out ruling no change in the leadership as the leadership wanted to save the party. But all over, Europe party leaders who had suffered setbacks resigned, such as the Irish Foreign Secretary, a much respected person.
So who is to decide if the party analyses the vote or not? Is this a leader prerogative? Who is to decide if the leadership enjoys the support of the party? Dr Busuttil now says there will be drastic changes – of everyone except himself, presumably.
The Nationalist Party has no God-given ‘non praevalebunt’ guarantee. It comes from a fractured past, an amalgam of two parties. The population, except for the party core, could come to consider it as obsolete, out of synch with the times, not representative of what ordinary people feel and believe. The very history of the country’s politics shows that when one party became obsolete, other political groupings came to light.
[email protected]