After the election in Germany last Sunday, the SPD, the social-democrat party, chose to dissolve the coalition with Angela Merkel’s CDU and go as the Opposition.

There was no angst, no tearing of hair, no catastrophe occurred. Losing an election, even by the large margin the SPD did, is normal in a democracy.

Instead of tearing themselves apart in recrimination, the SPD chose, if not actually welcomed, the chance to go in Opposition. This time, the SPD leaders said, it would give the party an opportunity to regroup, to get in touch again with the grass roots, to sort themselves out.

The SPD had precious Cabinet seats in the past legislature – the Foreign Ministry, and so on – and they could easily have had them again had they chosen to join Merkel’s coalition; instead, they chose to stay out of government. (Incidentally, the new coalition that is being formed is already known as the Jamaica coalition due to the colours of the Jamaican flag – the colours of the three parties in the prospective coalition are Green for the Greens, Black for the CDU and Yellow for the Liberals FDP).

This choice by the German SPD is in complete contrast to the PN’s reaction after losing the 2013 election as well as this year’s. The 25 years in government had made the PN believe it was the natural party for government. Four-and-a-half years after 2013, the PN grass roots have still not understood and grasped that it has lost power. Hence the anger at Simon Busuttil for having lost them another election… and hence Adrian Delia.

Those who masterminded the Delia campaign understood very well the PN grass roots psyche and played on it. Delia is the fighter who will restore PN to power. He will bring electoral success to the party as from the next general election, the EP and the local council elections.

Delia wowed them with haranguing speeches, with populist touches such as the Sunday morning mixing with men in clubs and kazini and with a rhetoric that maybe lacked substance but made up for it in decibels.

So an illusion was born – the Delia illusion. The PN grass roots and indeed the entire party structure want results, immediate results and they believe they have the right solution – Delia, Delia and more Delia. If one were to humbly suggest the SPD solution to them, that person would be booted out of the party and the country. Not for them any welcoming of a term out of office to regain their party identity.

But then PN does not have a proper identity such as Labour, for instance, has. Or rather, PN did have an identity but that was a long, long time ago, in the times of Nerik Mizzi, il-Gross, and the other Holy Fathers of the party. Then came Gorg Borg Olivier, who formed a party all on his own (so much so that Herbert Ganado split from that party, claiming that his own party was the real PN). Then came the triumvirate Eddie Fenech Adami, Lawrence Gonzi and Simon Busuttil who encapsulated a modernistic, outward-looking PN which soon lost touch with its historic past and with its grass roots.

So the grass roots, by vociferously choosing Delia saw him as the quick fix, who, by dint of his activism and his populism, would lead the 40,000 who abandoned the party in the last two elections to come back to the fold.

If only things were that simple.

So far, the attention has been focused on Adrian Delia as a man. Aspects of his character that have become public have underscored parts of his past (and maybe of his present) as undesirable in a man aiming to lead a national party. Maybe other lawyers-turned-developers cut corners too, maybe they end up owning or acting for owners of London properties who, known or unbeknown to them, service the oldest profession. But the other lawyers-turned-developers did not decide they wanted to become party leaders.

Lawyers and people in related professions, such as financial services, do end up being mixed with people who play around with the law but then they do not run for office. I must qualify this. On the one hand, this could mean that no one, but no one, except perhaps a civil servant, could have no skeletons in his cupboard and run for office. Even Simon Busuttil, who was a paragon of rectitude, was attacked for the number of retainers he got from the government in his speciality.

Then Delia handled, still handles, the allegations wrongly. There are the many libel cases he instituted against Daphne Caruana Galizia as regards the substantive issues. Whatever the truth, he has never, to my knowledge, acknowledged those may have been the wrong choices and apologized for them.

Nor has he committed himself to strict guidelines to ensure the mistakes of the past are not repeated again, by him or by anyone else. On the contrary, he promised an audit that was not an audit.

And as regards his turbulent financial situation (whose isn’t), he has not quite calmed anxious spirits that he intends to get two salaries, one as Leader of the Opposition and one as leader of the party.

These are new, uncharted, waters for those who elected him. The PN leadership was never in such a state.

Now we will have a series of elections for other party officials, beginning with the deputy leaders. Usually, what happens in the PN is that the majority that elected the leader then gets to elect the deputy leader that the leader prefers. Remember when Lawrence Gonzi got Tonio Borg elected? It may be, however, that the Delia wave fails to get his chosen deputies elected. Then we might get what Labour got – a deputy leader that was not the one chosen by the leader.

Speaking of Labour, I am sure I was not the only one to notice the glint, the gleaming look that Joseph Muscat had on his face as he welcomed Delia, the look a cat has when it spies a mouse. Then, at least according to yesterday’s papers, the man who shouted he was not afraid of Muscat, succumbed to the abolition of the election for the local councils’ association as soon as the doors closed.

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