I know it’s inevitable, especially after the second huge defeat, for PN to suffer pangs of anguish to get a leader by yesterday but then this second defeat shows how important it is to get the right one.

In 2013, the party rushed to get the leader in place and was panicked into choosing Lawrence Gonzi’s handpicked second in command.

We can track the 2017 defeat to that rush and panic. As a result of that rush, practically the same party officials remained from Gonzi to Busuttil. Ditto the media, after the great scare of not getting paid. The only area where some change took place was in the parliamentary group where most of the past ministers were turfed out in the vain hope that people seeing new faces might think the party has changed.

The result was not just the 37,000-ish difference between Labour and PN. On the contrary, we must consider the 44% proportion of the PN votes as around normal in years when the party is in Opposition (there are governments in Europe who would be happy to be elected in government with just 44%).

No, what I am talking about are the faults and the deficiencies that have become glaring in many people’s analysis of the defeat. Such as the media of the party where no change has taken place, where the same people still work and where no growth has happened, both in the print media and in the television station.

The party is what it is: a collection of party grass roots whose loyalty goes back years, who have been used to being in government, who are indispensable when it comes to the heavy lifting such as at election time and at the counting hall.

Then there were the intermediary bodies such as Solidarjeta Haddiema and AZAD, the women’s section and MZPN. My impression, from the outside, is that these groups have been allowed to become atrophied.

And of course, come election time, there is Elcom, the section monitoring turnout, solving problems regarding voting and encouraging party members and supporters to go out and vote. The bit where people get messages urging them to go and vote is that part which gets most people angry and I doubt its effectiveness on the whole.

I have left out the party clubs and I have already expressed myself as skeptical as to their effectiveness, let alone such prime property lying around mostly unused when the party is in straitened financial difficulties.

Then of course there is the vast mass of party supporters – those who go to party meetings and also those who do not, etc. To my knowledge there are no membership drives carried out which is strange considering the next leader will be chosen by the party grass roots.

I do hear sometimes of party conferences usually inside the clubs but my impression is that it is always the same people who attend.

Now besides these householding tasks, which I think have been largely ignored both by Gonzi and Busuttil, there is a vaster task ahead. What does the PN stand for, apart from opposition to Labour? I doubt if at any time anyone tried to find what do the party supporters think, really think. For instance the current Tonio Fenech campaign for the party to give a free vote on the Gay Marriage bill might be echoed by quite a large cross-section of the party base. So too would probably be some xenophobic expressions and statements that would shock the party leadership.

In other words, the party, out of office, is a beached whale, criss-crossed by contrasting opinions which have never been ironed out and sorted, but left to fester. It is only the party leadership that imposes its own sort of leadership.  And in no time at all, an election comes round and it’s all hands on deck.

And so far I have said nothing about the groups of party  delegates around a particular leader and their relations with the other leaders and groups. In Italian, such groups have become notoriously known as ‘correnti’ and there is copious literature in this regard.

Now all this tangle and mess of unsolved problems and groups working at loggerheads with each other is being asked to choose the new leader. Some names have already been mentioned and we have had people declaring themselves in favour or against, and some other names are still undeclared. People have been arguing against this or that candidate on the basis of his being ‘soft’ with Joseph Muscat while on the other hand others have been arguing for a stop to the confrontational approach which they say led to the election defeat.

Now the selection of a new leader can in a way untangle some of these issues but, as in 2013, it may also hide the problems under a carpet, the carpet being the new leader.

There could be, there should be, some way of first settling the really big issues and only then, and on the strength of what the base decides, to move to choose the new leader who does not come up with his own personal ideas, ambitions, antagonisms, bucket lists, etc but who must reflect the orientations as expressed by the party grass roots. Maybe he will not be the best thing since apple juice, but then he will at least be representing the grass roots of the party thus ensuring a far better cohesiveness.

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