Interview • February 15 2004

Battle of the ‘clones’ in Pietà

The reason why the PN’s candidates have been denied a confrontational debate is because they all have the same vision, according to party secretary-general Joe Saliba

By Matthew Vella
Alfred Sant may say Labour is not interested in the Nationalist Party’s leadership race, but Joe Saliba, the PN’s secretary-general since 1999, says the manner in which the Labour media has spent the last weeks tracing stories of factional opposition between the three candidates running for PN sire and Prime Minister, indicate otherwise.
"Sant is interested, indirectly. The Labour Party wants to know who its next opponent will be."
And so is the rest of the island, which unfortunately will have to make do with the little it knows of each candidate for the PN post. By PN decree, there will be no three-way debate between Louis Galea, Lawrence Gonzi, and John Dalli. Taking a similar line is that institution of government lackeys, the PBS, which has denied the general public an opportunity to watch all three potential Prime Ministers in action against each other.
Saliba denies the PN has had anything to do with PBS’s god-fearing conformity, which directed news presenters to interview the candidates in the ‘best-for-last’ order that is decreed to be Galea-Dalli-Gonzi, as well as denying Louis Galea an interview on other news programmes for having already been interviewed by Ivan Camilleri on Sebatijiem.
Saliba maintains there has been no attempt to have Gonzi enjoy favourable terms in this election. He said a libel action was pending against Super One News, after the Labour newsroom said Saliba had personally directed the NET newsroom to place the news item featuring Louis Galea submitting his nomination on Tuesday second to an item announcing Lawrence Gonzi would be submitting his nomination on Saturday (yesterday): "I categorically deny this. This week the party administration met up with our journalists and handed down the rules relating to this electoral race. Whatever priority is given to the news items is not something I decide, but it is within the hands of the newsroom. If I was head of news today I would have placed one of the candidates as a first item, and the next day another candidates as first item in the news agenda, so there would be no problems of this sort."
As it turns out, it will be influence and district campaigning that will dictate the election of a new PN leader, which is why most of the Ministers’ private secretariats have suspended ministerial duties and instead taken to campaigning for a hopeful four-year stint at Castille, eager to become top dogs of the private secretariat world in Maltese politics.
There is nothing much to prove for the Prime Minister-in-waiting in the next three weeks except flood the PN’s party councillors with as much charisma as possible, and a couple of biblical references for good measure.
But according to Saliba, there could almost be nothing to expect from a three-way debate between the three main candidates for the PN leadership contest. He maintains that the same vision unites the three contenders, so what is all the fuss about then?
"The Party executive has decided that there will be no debate between the candidates because none of them will be in the position to take part in a confrontational debate since they have the same direction. The candidates do not hail from opposing parties. They do not hail from different schools of thought. They come from the same party.
"Their style may be different, but these three candidates are tied down by the PN’s electoral programme. None of them can redirect their vision away from the electoral programme. The programme is what formed the basis of the PN’s re-election to power and the PN government is striving to implement what the people have voted the party in power for. So when somebody eventually asks the candidates a question, the three of them are liable to respond in similar ways. The answers may not be necessarily the same."
While Saliba opposes having the three contenders in a decisive face-off for the consumption of the general public, there are doubts as to how much the three frontrunners actually share in style and policies. The three ministers are undeniably influenced by the brinkmanship they portray through their portfolios, character traits which have shaped their different styles – Dalli has been called bullish, whilst Gonzi’s charisma is evidently characterising the man. Galea on the other hand has lacked positive media portrayal. Yet it is unlikely how many share the same vision on the future of the party and the government’s direction for the next four years.
"If you had to place them together, you would not have a debate save for some slight differences in vision," Saliba insists. "The difference in character is certainly there. But do you imagine having a debate the same way a debate between two people from rival parties would be? I have no doubt they may have different priorities. But in a confrontation between them, the arguments that will emerge would only reflect their very same vision.
"They will be participating in all the media, and they will probably be facing the same or similar questions, but they will not be meeting each other in the same room for an interview. That is an emotional element for the media, and it is not healthy debate. What we want is for the people to understand their vision."
Saliba’s position in this race has also placed him at the heart of musings about his personal favourite. He has been especially careful not to place any weight behind any of the candidates by refusing to dish out any form of individual appraisal for any one of the candidates – in the same way Gonzi, Dalli and Galea are supposed to have the same vision for the country, there is nothing much to say about the single ovation Saliba gives to all three of them:
"I will be voting and I have to vote for one person only. It is a pity because there are candidates who are all suited for this position. They all have positive credentials and values with which to be elected leader of the PN. The difference between the PN and the MLP is that Labour has no suitable candidate to lead its party in the right way. I am sorry I will be able to vote for only one person because the three of them are suitable for PN leadership. But as secretary-general I cannot be openly in favour of anyone of them. I totally exclude that I will be in favour or against anyone."
Saliba refuses to offer a positive comment for each candidate and instead describes all three of them with the same qualities of what he perceives are those of a PN leader:
"The first should be the ability to forge unity. This unity has always been existent within the party. The biggest virtue of Fenech Adami was to keep this party together and united. This is one of the main values that a new leader should have in order to keep the party united in one vision.
"The other is the continuous aspect of solidarity. The new PN leader must not see the results of progress in the same way as Alfred Sant judged results - what I describe as seeing matters in the same way one uses a calculator. The leader has to see that human results are achieved, in order to see what society has really gained.
"The third is for the next leader to have Fenech Adami’s political acumen, the kind of prowess which he possessed when leading the PN to six electoral victories. He could understand people, and understand what they want and deliver to these people."
I tell Saliba that anyone would think a Fenech Adami person can only be Gonzi. Saliba says he himself would be honoured having to be described with these same qualities, but yet does little to reveal what differences in leadership qualities the three candidates have: "They may have their own character and temperament, and their own history. It also depends on where they hail from and the way they have been brought up. I am convinced that all of them are superior to each other in certain aspects, and less superior in others."
He also says that he will be comfortable working with any of them, ruling out any form of resignations that could be prompted by the election of any one leader:
"Why should there be any resignations? We are all in the same team. The way some people imagine the PN works is that everything revolves around the leader. Naturally there are different factions in the party. There are different vision and different forces in this party. The new leader will be showing his mettle when seeking compromise between these forces. This is the crucial factor in our party. But the appointment of non-elected positions in the party happen through the party administration, by a group of people. It won’t be myself who will be employing people. It is like a board of directors and it is a group decision. This is the way we have worked until now. The same goes for other officials elected to the party executive. As it stands there is no reason to herald change in the top echelons when a new leader takes control."
Recovering from the resignation of Eddie Fenech Adami as party leader, the PN media spent a whole weekend paying swanky tribute to their leader, in the helm for 27 years at Pietà. For the time being, the PN had managed to change the focus of concern in the country to the exaltation of Fenech Adami, successfully absconding him from all bruises related to the outcome of the Meinrad Calleja trial by jury and the disheartening performance of the economy, a miscalculation of post-EU accession seasonal changes.
"I don’t think Eddie Fenech Adami left under a dark cloud. I don’t agree the Meinrad Calleja trial and the performance of the economy are overshadowing factors in this resignation.
"The whole media acknowledged the fact that Fenech Adami was going to call it a day and that he would not be leading the PN in the 2008 election. The fact that he decided to initiate the electoral process to have a new leader elected to the party on his seventieth birthday is a clear sign that it was a question of age.
"Fenech Adami himself said the party exaggerated in its display of tribute to him. But we felt we owed him such a tribute. This leader has been the head of the PN for 27 years, a leader who changed the party from the bottom-up, and a leader who won six elections out of seven, if you include the EU referendum. So I think we have had a leader who changed Maltese society and enabled it to progress, along with his team and the party. The reality is that we had a lot of people who wanted to pay tribute to Fenech Adami, and even left some others out of the whole programme. We could have gone on for days."