On Saturday Alternattiva Demokratika will meet to elect a new leader after an umpteenth election in which the Green Party once again failed to break past the 2% mark, around which it has hovered since 2003.
The meeting will take place against the backdrop of an independent electoral defeat report, which laid most of the blame for the result at the door of outgoing chairman, Dr Harry Vassallo.
Those who have followed the Green Party’s fortunes since its inception in 1989 might find this a bitter pill to swallow. True, Vassallo may not have matched the expectations raised by the 2004 MEP election result – when Green candidate Arnold Cassola polled 23,000 first preference votes – but it must be conceded that he did turn around the party’s fortunes entirely since taking over in 1998.
Before then, AD was widely perceived as a splinter group consisting mainly of disgruntled Labourites: a reputation consolidated by the fact that its previous chairman, Wenzu Mintoff, had so to speak “colonised” the party after falling out with the MLP administration in the late 1980s.
One could argue that it was Vassallo who elevated a virtual lobby group to the status of political party to begin with, finding a home within the family of European Greens. More significantly, Vassallo also restored to the party its environmentalist credentials: in fact it would not be an exaggeration to state that the dawning of a Green conscience within the Nationalist Party came about primarily to stem a haemorrhage of PN voters to AD, largely as a result of Vassallo’s influence.
Having said that, the report’s conclusions certainly provide an accurate reflection of the internal problems that have dogged the party’s administration under his tenure. As expected, Vassallo’s misadventures with the VAT department featured prominently in the analysis. Although Vassallo himself was absolved of any wrongdoing, it was nonetheless correctly pointed out that, for the leader of a party which has so often criticised the government for inefficiency and incorrectness, heading into an election with an unresolved issue of that magnitude was akin to rushing headlong where angels fear to tread. After all, one must keep one’s own house in order before complaining about the mess elsewhere.
Vassallo’s failure to address his own VAT-related issues before the election was also presented as symptomatic of AD’s problems as a whole. Significantly, the report made a direct link with the VAT return issue and the party’s failure to collect the signatures necessary for an abrogative referendum on rent reform: a shortcoming which reinforced the popular perception of a party which lacked the material resources to deliver on its own promises.
From this perspective, AD’s independent analysis report stands in sharp contrast with that of the Malta Labour Party, published amid a furore of controversy ahead of Labour’s own leadership contest last week.
It is astonishing, for instance, that Labour’s defeat report would single out deputy leader (and leadership contender) Michael Falzon over his role as director of the party’s electoral office... but find hardly a word of blame about former leader Alfred Sant, who had been identified by so many surveys as the party’s greatest electoral Achilles’ heel. By the same token it is hard to understand how only one official, Falzon, can be “named and shamed” in the report... while the party secretary-general Jason Micallef escaped any direct mention at all.
The upshot was that Falzon felt aggrieved enough to publicly accuse the reports’ authors of attempting to sabotage his own leadership bid, while at the same time exonerating those perceived to be closer to his rival contender. An understandable reaction, but one which nevertheless underscores the deeply ingrained problems within the Malta Labour Party, which seems incapable of seizing upon opportunities to truly renew itself in the face of a string of electoral defeats.
Newly elected Labour leader Joseph Muscat would do well to consider the implications of his party’s handling of the report. Not only has the clumsy attempt to shift the focus of blame exposed the enormous rift between different factions and cliques within the party; but it has also pre-emptively weakened the Opposition, to the extent that all of Muscat’s four leadership rivals have ruled out any involvement in party structures for the foreseeable future.
Muscat now finds himself with the task of convincing the disgruntled old guard to remain within the fold; but he must also reach out to the moderate voters who genuinely wish to see a serious opposition and alternative government in the making. Perhaps it would not be amiss to take a leaf out of AD’s book, and analyse its own problems from an altogether more independent and self-critical angle.