The PN’s campaign is played out for every single voter as a choice between doves and hawks, goodies and baddies – but will this desperate strategy cut losses ahead of an expected hammering, or will it truly bear fruit? By MATTHEW VELLA
They are the wild bunch. An unfathomable coming-together of opposites and misfits with just one goal in mind – giving Brussels to Lawrence Gonzi – or else, giving the prime minister a dignified defeat with a vote share of nothing less than 40%, after the veritable drubbing of 2004.
Or maybe that’s what they wanted us to think. Gonzi’s candidates for the European Parliament election were fielded with targeted audiences in mind, reflective of the PN’s ethos of the ‘broad church’. They wanted to appeal to the green vote so they got in the ‘green whistleblower’ Alan Deidun; they got in Vince Farrugia to attract the vote of the business community; they wanted a liberal, so they fielded young Edward Demicoli, with his token statements in favour of divorce and against spring hunting; but they also wanted to keep the hunters’ vote, so they got in Alex Perici Calascione, brother to Joe, the president of the hunting lobby.
And of course, since they wanted to branch out to their disgruntled floaters, they fielded a grunt for the disgruntled: Frank Portelli, former MP, sometime critic of state bureaucracy and inefficiencies, but lured back into the party fold with a candidacy for MEP.
And apart from this kaleidoscope of pedigrees, the Nationalist MEP candidates suddenly started sounding off against the government they supported. For example, while Finance Minister Tonio Fenech told all and sundry they could forget getting a refund on the VAT they paid on registration tax, out came Roberta Metsola Tedesco Triccas saying that the government should refund the VAT. Evidently caught wrong-footed by the surprise announcement, Fenech suggested the PN candidate may have fallen victim to Labour’s ‘spin’, with Triccas later clarifying that while government was correct legally, it “would stand to gain” by giving the refund.
This first statement seemed to herald the style of the Nationalist campaign, where candidates would declare their independence of the government they supported. Frank Portelli was let loose on immigration, pursuing a right-wing agenda and attacking Libya as a sponsor of irregular immigration. Home Affairs minister Carm Mifsud Bonnici was not impressed, seeing that the less Libya was criticised, the more he could hold on to a better working relationship with the North African country. He soon sounded off against Portelli.
But it was not just Cabinet ministers who found themselves upstaged by lippy candidates. Incumbent MEP Simon Busuttil’s own game was actually given short shrift by PN ideologue Ranier Fsadni, who remarked how Busuttil actually used his carefully trimmed rhetoric to convey a partly-xenophobic message in his criticism of the support of Socialists and Greens in the EP to give a class of legal migrants the vote in local council elections – something that already existed for British nationals in Malta before becoming an EU member state.
The amendment to his report on burden sharing was a late addition by the PES and the Greens, which Busuttil voted against in the committee stage – in protest at the amendment – and then voted in favour of the entire report at the plenary. But as Fsadni noted, referring to the way Busuttil’s critique of the amendment, “once condensed by others into soundbite… can easily pander to the idea that legal migrants are a social danger and ought not be granted any civic rights… The way in which the criticism is hammered by the party machine makes it sound like the bigots are right – without, of course, the machine ever saying that they are,” Fsadni went on.
Curiously, Fsadni’s astute observation seemed to sum up the party campaign altogether – clearly, every MEP candidate was firing missives on everything under the sun, without actually presenting a clear party front on the issues.
Metsola Tedesco Triccas declared herself in favour of increasing maternity leave to 20 weeks, but the PN government has refused to budge from its 14-week minimum position.
Deidun himself has found himself in a quandary – for years leading his own personal campaign against the government’s environmental record from the columns of the Sunday Times, he held press conferences to highlight the plight of Nadur farmers and Wied il-Ghasel due to the planning decisions at MEPA: the same MEPA which Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi pledged last year to address in his MEPA reform.
And while Demicoli sounded off against spring hunting, MEP candidate Alex Perici Calascione was in Luxembourg as a part of the Maltese defence team in the case brought by the European Commission for the opening of the spring hunting season, for four years consecutively.
So are the PN actually sending a single, clear message on what their campaign is and, most importantly, what the PN is all about? Part-liberal or plain conservative? Eager to keep hunters’ votes from going Labour’s way, or attempting to rein in floaters and the middle-class who dislike spring hunting and who have at least one broken marriage in the family?
Neither here nor there, the party’s ideological blitzkrieg has been firing off at focus group targets. To a segment of the public, this tactic will do little to impress once the ideological holes are uncovered – indeed, the chances are that with no government at stake, third parties like Alternattiva Demokratika will get the green and liberal vote; while Azzjoni Nazzjonali will lap up some of the crumbs from the irregular immigration debate. On the latter, it seems more likely that it will be Labour to capitalise on its tough, law and order stand, which is now perilously bordering onto the xenophobic.
But in terms of the wider vote, the PN is out to cut losses in an election promising to be disappointing yet again for a party that considers Europe its manifest destiny.
So what’s left in the campaign strongbox? So far, the two most visible electioneering flashcards were the negative billboard and the abortion cards. But even here, problems have cropped up for the Nationalists.
First, they tried to pass off Labour’s 12 MEP candidates as direct products of Dom Mintoff and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici in their ‘Skond iz-zokk il-fergha’ billboard, but alluding such harsh histories to the likes of Edward Scicluna and Marlene Mizzi – the Labour frontrunners – is a misnomer in itself.
Then, seemingly in a bid to stem a middle-class exodus, they branded the choice between PN candidates and Labour as a matter of taste. Victorian as it sounds, the tactic is debatable given the realities of the new middle-class that tends to straddle both sides of the political divide, seeing politic as less a matter of taste than how it affects their quality of life.
It all boiled down to a question of ‘who pressed the right buttons’ – referring to the confusion in votes by the three Labour MEPs on a package of EP votes related to migration. Rightly so, but is this all a campaign for MEPs is about?
And never straying far from the Nationalist arsenal of tricks was abortion, which Gonzi himself used in his face-off with Joseph Muscat on Bondiplus on Monday. Apparently Muscat voted in favour of a report which included a paragraph to guarantee reproductive rights to women; to this Muscat answered that he was not about to ignore the entire content of a report only because of a reference to abortion.
Muscat was right there – once you’re inside Brussels, everything an MEP votes upon goes beyond the provincial bugbears of the Maltese islands, abortion included. If the Nationalists are not ready to let go of their hang-ups on abortion, divorce and gay rights, can they ever really be inside Europe? This election may just as well show us.
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