For the last few years I have been in the habit of writing a festive season article addressed to readers of The Times. Around Christmas and the New Year it makes sense to ease off a little.
This year I am in the throes of transfer to this newspaper and its sister Illum as Consulting Editor, and the festive season has been passed in the challenge of transition. I am not in much of a mood to be nice to anyone. Nor to write some namby pamby bit to go with your mulled wine and mince pies.
All the best for 2009, of course, but the best that most of us can expect will not be very good at all. Those of us who follow the news – and that’s not all of us – know that the financial world is adrift and all landmarks are lost. We can expect the bite to take hold in 2009. Even if we did not invest our savings where they could evaporate, and even if our banking system was largely spared the worst because it is conservatively structured as befits the tiniest and the most vulnerable, something will hit us for sure.
The 2009 tourist season already looks like it will be breathtakingly painful through no new fault of ours. Insecurity among our habitual guests, the plummeting British pound, simply takes out our major clientele. The export industry is facing a drop in orders as clients fold up or take cover by reducing their operations. Worst of all is the inability to predict which of one’s clients is likely to be knocked out of the running.
Chances are that our Prime Minister will be called upon to lead the country rather than the Nationalist Party. There is nobody else to do the job. He is the one leader whose job it will be to rally the country in a time of deep crisis. The question arises as to whether he has what it takes.
The GonziPN investment in his persona did pay off in the 2008 election, but only just. He was the chosen leader for just under half the country in March 2008 and for much less very soon after. It bodes ill for us all that there really is no one at all who can call for unity and concerted effort in a time of crisis.
The manner in which party and government become interchangeable in a one party scenario makes it even more difficult for Lawrence Gonzi. His success, if it can be called that, was gained by deepening the divide, recalling the ancient fears, hurts and hatreds. More than the ideal solution, he is himself half the problem, when everything goes wrong.
Announcing major policy changes or some mega-project in his Sunday activity in the embrace of the PN has only added to the identification of party and government, further alienating those who do not belong to his party. It is a deliberate practice of exclusion, a direct descendant of the period of pathological politics his party so often recalls.
If he is called upon to act as the country’s leader in a national crisis, as opposed to one of the usual petty squabbles, he may come to regret the day he decided to forgo his stature as a national figure. We may all come to regret it far more.
Dr Gonzi’s fault, if fault there is, has been to inherit a way of doing politics, to be good at it, and to make it worse. He has not had the greatness to desire a change nor the ability to bring it about. On the contrary, he has served his party to the hilt in its symbiotic dance-cum-war with the PL.
Would Dr Joseph Muscat fare any better? It seems improbable. Every step he makes on his own initiative creates resentment and rancour within his own party, to be broadcast and celebrated by his opponents as far as they are able. He has promised us earthquakes but already it is clear that the PL edifice is not strong enough to withstand any great shakes, and threatens to tumble down upon him at the slightest tremor.
Neither Dr Gonzi nor Dr Muscat can be blamed for our political heritage: it is the result of decades of division. The mutual dependence of the PN and PL in the dance of fear was there long before they could do anything about it. They are its products, not its makers.
Too bad. We will just have to face what 2009 throws at us with the leadership structure we have. Have a great time everybody… all the best.
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