Last week, as Britain celebrated the 70th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth on the throne with a day-long parade, they got out the gilded Coronation coach which many people had never seen and paraded it around.
Inside the coach one could see an animated image of the Queen, younger and in black and white, smiling and waving to the crowds.
That is called a hologram, an insubstantial animated image.
Here in Malta we too have our hologram. It is called the Nationalist Opposition – animated but insubstantial, a waste of space, showing much but at the end just hot air.
Over the past weeks we have watched these newbies taking their first steps in Parliament, the accent being more on their dresses and their participation in State events like the Sette Giugno one. Some, not all, have taken to give us videos from some speech they made in Parliament – the easiest way, cut and paste.
Not all have social media sites, or at least I am not aware of them all. The overall impression one gets is that once they made it to Parliament, they need not bother about us the electorate until the next election. They will soon tire of the State functions, the deadening celebrations, the back -biting and the bitchiness that goes on.
The party has all those party clubs around the island about which such a fuss is made but my impression is that many are closed day in day out, and those that open are usually dark and anyway frequented by a small group of insiders. Most of those who voted PN have never been inside one.
The party then has its structures with committees etc but my impression, always from the outside, is that these are mostly circles of insiders who do not open up and seek newcomers. The bias is always against newcomers. The party meetings, such as we see before an election, show the same people over and over again.
The number of those who voted PN is vaster than this relatively small core. This small core chooses the party leader although they do not have the deselection powers as they have in the UK.
But that’s all, that’s the limit of the involvement of these people. The party’s MPs, the next step in the party hierarchy, could perhaps organise working groups, discussion groups etc but they tend to leave this in the hands of the party’s top levels. Which accounts for the fact that anytime you enter the party headquarters, unless on really special occasions, it’s empty and your footsteps reverberate in the empty corridors.
The party is a hologram, a chimera, and this is nowhere so clear as on the party’s media, which continues to lose money head over fist. The party leader has recently pledged to turn them into profit-making enterprises. To me, he would sooner get water out of a pebble. The media seems more a place where some party persons are parked with an easy job.
The party must remember it is now the third force in the country for at the last election it has been overtaken by that motley coalition of those who did not vote, those who refused to vote, and those who honestly did not know who to vote for. This group can only get bigger only if the party does not make serious efforts to get in touch with it.
This brings me to another point. We opinion writers, those of us who write on the social media, those who in one way or another influence others can testify that many times we find ourselves in a vacuum, with no input at all from the party in opposition.
That’s why the party is a hologram, an insubstantial ghost. Yet it occupies a very important position in the Maltese political landscape, which is a pity. And it’s not just a hologram but also an inanimate one too.
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