Editorial | Sunday, 28 June 2009

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Officially out of touch

“I expect the PN General Council to seriously take note of the people’s disgruntlement.” “We have a situation of complacency where government seems not to be interested in what the people are saying.” “I have had it up to my ears listening to the people’s complaints”...
These are but a few of the comments given to this newspaper by Nationalist Party councillors and officials, in the build up to what was supposed to be a routine General Council this weekend.
It is difficult to miss the overall tone of urgency and expectation in their comments. Although contacted separately, nearly all mayors of councillors expressed more or less the same concern: at both party and government level, the PN appears to have lost touch with its grassroots, and succeeded in imparting the impression of a lofty and arrogant administration that takes its support-base for granted.
From this perspective, the decision by the party executive to abjure the General Council altogether is hard to digest. Already under fire for being “out of synch” with the people, the Nationalist Party has inexplicably chosen to send out the worst possible message: i.e., that the above criticism is more true than even the party malcontents appear to believe. Not only is the party in government unconcerned with the root causes of the people’s disgruntlement; but it seems reluctant to even discuss the issue.
Instead, top officials appear interested only in postponing a now-inevitable confrontation, and for no other visible reason than to preserve their own positions within the party.
These include no fewer than three beleaguered incumbents occupying seats in the front row: party president Victor Scerri, currently embroiled in a polemic over his ODZ permit in Bahrija; secretary-general Paul Borg Olivier, whom some (but significantly not all) of the party bigwigs hold responsible for the election defeat; and above all leader Lawrence Gonzi himself, who has a mutinous backbench to deal with, as well as rogue ministers like Austin Gatt, by whom he is all too often eclipsed in public.
Admittedly it is unlikely in the extreme that the ensuing mayhem would have amounted to a “vote of no confidence” in Gonzi’s leadership, or anything comparably dramatic (even though, by the Prime Minister’s own admission, “together everything is possible” – a possibility extenuated by the decision itself, which appears motivated by a desire to avoid precisely such an eventuality.)
A likelier outcome by far would have been a visible, palpable manifestation of the frustration and disaffection currently gripping the party at all levels: itself a reflection of grassroots’ unease at the way in which the PN appears to have lost sight of its own most cherished principles.
Certainly we would have seen none of the traditional obsequies of the kind epitomised so frequently at such events by party treasurer Peter Darmanin: the standing ovations; public displays of servility; aggressive demands for “total loyalty” to the leader, etc.
On the contrary it is perfectly possible that senior party officials would have found themselves avoiding such declarations precisely for fear of eliciting an honest reply.
Having said this, in truth we will now never really know how the General Council would have unfolded, were it to have gone ahead as planned. But it is for this very reason that the PN could not afford to give the impression of having chickened out at such a crucial stage.
By avoiding any sincere and meaningful post-mortem of the European election – and above all by actively shunning any circumstances in which its own internal divisions may become visible on the outside, the Nationalist Party has succeeded in graphically illustrating the precise point that so many of its own councillors have expressed separately to this newspaper: i.e., that it is now officially out of touch with the people it once championed.
The subliminal message is inescapable: party officials are more concerned with suppressing dissent and containing the haemorrhage, than with coming to terms with its own problems.
Worse, the party executive appears to have closed ranks in a bid to protect Lawrence Gonzi from even the possibility of internal attack: a move which can only denote weakness on the leader’s part, as it is now clear that he would sooner avoid a pressing problem than confront it.
And this, from the party which still prides itself on the courage with which it fought for citizens’ rights in the turbulent 1970s and 1980s. Remarkable, that it should have come to this.

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