Time seems to have stood still for the PN since the election defeat. Otherwise, it marches on. Parliament will reconvene on Saturday, the casual elections will fill the last remaining seats, the controversies will roll on and the party is still a long way from getting a new leader now that Simon Busuttil has categorically ruled himself out.

I believe that the PN’s first proper reflection should be to ask itself what kind of party it wants to be. Contrary to what its grass roots might think, there is nothing that guarantees the PN’s continued existence through the centuries. True, it has a long and chequered history; so far, it has kept its flag and its songs – even if one of them bears an uncanny resemblance to the Fascist Giovinezza. It is not an elitist party, nor a party of the top levels of society. It is a party of the masses, although these masses seem to have abandoned it in part in the past two elections.

But there is no guarantee that it will remain forever. In neighbouring Italy, for instance, the once mighty Democrazia Cristiana, a sister party of the PN, has disappeared. Its time had come. There are already signs that the PN motto ‘Religio et Patria’ does not exactly reflect the reality of the PN today. This was precisely the point made by Tonio Fenech last week, and may also have inspired his decision to leave politics.

He stressed that today’s PN has departed from its ‘Religio’ base. This complaint is shared by others inside the PN, but they have not, so far, abandoned the party – or, if they have, maybe they abstained from voting and no-one is the wiser.

With what will the PN replace ‘Religio’? Up until 2013 it was the party in government, with a glorious past of which to boast. Since 2013, this theme seems to have been substituted with animosity against Joseph Muscat and his government.

This peaked in the last election with the emphasis on corruption, leading to the most acrimonious confrontation we have just come out of. It is still reverberating because the Panama issue has not been cleared up, as we could see from the European Parliament debate and its consequences.

However, it is clear (at least to me) that this confrontational attitude was not enough to gain PN traction. On the contrary, PN lost by an even larger margin than in 2013.

Now the party is being called to decide if it is to trust in the cyclical movement of history and wait for the time when the tide will turn and Labour begins to lose, while an intransigent PN waits in the wings.

Or the party can choose to adopt a different stance. In the minds of many people – and certainly in mine – this issue is intimately connected with the choice of a new leader, given that Simon Busuttil’s name will forever be linked to the confrontational approach he fostered in the election (and to the many tactical mistakes which, in my opinion, he made).

Over the past few days, especially since Dr Busuttil confirmed in Gozo that his stepping down was irrevocable, there has been considerable agitation below sea level inside the party between the various groups backing the different horses.

The election will be between different candidates and, through them, between different conceptions of what the party should be like. The election of a party leader is no fashion parade: the candidates all mean something different even if it is not possible to categorise them in terms of left or right.

Beneath and beyond this, each candidate represents a faction inside the party. To use an Italian term, each candidate represents a ‘cordata’ – a group of people roped together as they do in the mountains.

I am coming to realise that the candidate comes with his own group (I use the masculine pronoun because I have not heard of any female candidate). We can see this if we consider the Simon Busuttil group which has now gone down with him.

Some of this group are migrating to other candidates while, at the same time, certain people who were certainly not from the Busuttil ‘cordata’ have been quite vocal on the social media not just about their own exclusion (against which they protest) but also about how they can still help.

In short, the PN is in turmoil, perhaps for the first time since 1977 when George Borg Olivier resigned after losing two elections in succession. Things were really hot then between the followers of Borg Olivier and those of, for instance, Guido de Marco. There were a couple of tense incidents before Eddie Fenech Adami emerged as the new leader. That is a story worth telling.

Before continuing, I want to ask whether the PN intends to continue to perpetuate this presidential way of looking at elections. It may find it is better to face up to the PL monolith with a collective – a team at the top from which the new leader will emerge only in time. That is what happened in 1977 when Ugo Mifsud Bonnici, Eddie and others each came with his own group which they then pooled together against Guido. The power of the collective turned out to be stronger than the attraction of a single, if talented, individual. And Eddie at first was not the foremost candidate.

Simon Busuttil said just after he resigned – and was vilified for it – that the party must take its time to choose the new leader. He is right. Instead, we are seeing extreme agitation by campaign managers and the like not just for their preferred candidate but, above all, against the other candidates. Maybe these people do have the good of the party and of the nation in their minds, but maybe they are also focused on establishing a power base for themselves.

And I do not believe that the solution is to bring in an outsider, even if he were the ‘ideal person’. The basic concept of politics is expressed in political parties and even Emmanuel Macron, the ultimate outsider, has spent his life as a member of a party before setting up his own.

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