Your first 100 days as leader of the Labour Party have been promising. This does not mean that I agree with everything that you have said and done. The best way to corrupt you as my leader is to say that you are perfect and that you are already performing miracles. I do not want to corrupt you. You will have enough persons within the party and beyond praising you and agreeing always with you in your presence. Listen to them and do not believe them if you want to preserve your sanity and a good sense of judgement.
Together with my colleagues in the Labour Party and those who are ready to participate in the transformation of the party I want to help you win the hearts and minds of the majority of our people through our actions and policies and convince them that we will bring about the necessary changes to improve education, healthcare, the quality of the environment, create a sustainable economy that raises the income of working and middle-class families and introduce new civil liberties to have a more open and democratic society like we have in the best parts of the European continent.
Your best initiatives so far have been reaching out and involving as many people as possible within the party. Your greatest asset is that you are not constrained by any narrow partisan mindset and this gives you a wide space for manoeuvre. I support your strategic objective of building an alliance of moderates and progressives.
This is easier said than done as it involves a very delicate balancing act fraught with risks and dangers, but we have no option but to carry out deep changes that threaten the comfort zones of our supporters without guaranteeing us automatically that we win over new supporters. We have to succeed in a complicated operation where we must keep the traditional voters we have and attract new voters who distrust us or feel very distant from us.
To attract new voters we must go to them and start an open dialogue with them. To bring this about we need to explore and cultivate any common ground and convergence with individuals and organizations in our civil society, including Alternattiva Demokratika. We must also connect with the liberals who feel uncomfortable voting for the PN as it is afraid to bring in progressive social reforms like divorce and full rights for gays.
I would like you to get rid of any inferiority complex you might have regarding the PN and several of its main opinion leaders. You must overcome your need to seek endorsement. Trying to appease them will just make you weaker and more vulnerable. They must not be your points of reference. You must also prepare himself for the tough times ahead. As my friend Sammy Meilaq says: “Politics is not a friendly football game.” The PN is ready to do everything to hold on to power. I do not mind telling you what Michael Moore told Barack Obama a few days ago: “Do not turn up for a gunfight with a pea shooter.”
In your first 100 days you have welcomed back with open arms a number of persons who left the party in the last 16 years. I agree that we should do all we can to bring back our “lost sheep”. I have no doubt that for them it was the shepherd who was lost and not them. It is good to have them back as long as they move ahead with the party and do not think and behave as if the best way to persuade the majority of our citizens that we are fit to govern is by going back to what made us lose the 1981, 1987 and 1992 general elections.
Changing the Labour Party is an ongoing complicated and difficult process. It is a formidable task. You have started this process in an imaginative and bold way. The process must be sustained on every level: changes within the party structures from the grass-roots up, building good policy making mechanisms and practices, having an effective electoral machine that drives us to chase every vote, being in touch with the needs and aspirations of the working and middle class families of our country, ensuring a credible party media and communicating effectively with the increasing thousands who use the internet to inform themselves and to discuss what is going on in the world today.
Changing style is essential. But changing our substance is more essential, even in these days of doing politics the American way. We must be able to answer these difficult questions: What does the Labour Party stand for in the first decade of the 21st century? How can it run Malta better than the PN and create the necessary political, economic, social and cultural conditions in our islands to give our people a much better quality of life?