Back in 1975, the Nationalist party changed its statute to ensure that the party’s next leader after Gorg Borg Olivier would be elected by party councillors: the equivalent of the MLP’s delegates.
Prior to these changes, the PN leader was elected by the party’s congress, in which all party members could vote.

The 1975 amendments paved the way for the election by party councillors of Eddie Fenech Adami as Borg Olivier’s successor in January 1977.
Prof. Guido de Marco, who was defeated by Eddie Fenech Adami in the landmark 1977 contest, had voted for restricting voting rights to councillors, despite being tipped as a favourite among party members.
“Probably I would have been elected if members voted, but I still favoured the amendments because at that time such an election would have been unwieldy and messy,” De Marco told MaltaToday.
While on Friday it was the MLP’s delegates who turned down a motion to enfranchise party members, in 1975 it was the PN members themselves who surrounded their electoral rights to the party’s councillors.
Guido de Marco is wary of any comparisons between the present situation in the MLP and that in the PN in 1975.
“We were living under Dom Mintoff… could you imagine the PN organising an election at that time?” asks De Marco.
He also claims that at that time, PN lacked the tools to organise an election involving all members.
In 1975 the PN had far fewer members than the MLP today, but according to De Marco party members already numbered in the thousands.
“Conducting such an election without databases and an organised membership system was unwieldy,” said De Marco.
De Marco now believes that election of the party leader by members is more “doable” than it was before, citing foreign examples like the election of Romano Prodi as the centre left candidate in 2005.
Writing in his blog, former PN president and present day AD spokesperson, Carmel Cacopardo was the first to draw parallels between the PN’s decision to restrict voting rights to members in 1975 and the botched attempt by the George Abela camp to enfranchise MLP members.
Cacopardo notes that both decisions were of a strategic nature.
“The PN’s decision in 1975 was strategic. Had that reform not been enacted, it is possible that the PN’s reform would not have taken the same direction it took under Fenech Adami.”
Under Fenech Adami the party moved towards the centre left to make inroads among workers and lower middle class voters.
Cacopardo also notes that whoever proposed the extension of the MLP’s electoral college on Friday, and those who had defended the voting rights of members in the PN in 1975, did not do so “because they shed tears for party members, but because this would have strengthened their position in the party.”

jdebono@mediatoday.com.mt