The reports of Gonzi’s government’s early death are always exaggerated. He will wobble on until the next general election in June 2013. He is not going to let go of his hold on power and no backbencher will break ranks, however disgruntled he might be. Dr Gonzi, short of promoting them to ministers or parliamentary secretaries, will do all he can to accommodate them and give in to their demands as long as they continue to support him by their vote in parliament. Gonzi knows very well that only by voting with the Opposition will a backbencher break his bones, but words will never hurt him.
So do not expect Gonzi’s government to get shipwrecked on a backbencher’s soundbite, however juicy it might be. If Dr Jean Pierre Farrugia and some fellow MPs threaten to vote against a primary healthcare reform they feel undermines a public funded national health service and betrays the PN’s fundamental values, Dr Gonzi will change that policy not to risk defeat in a parliamentary vote.
There is also a plan to make sure that government does not lose the vote on the Opposition’s motion on the Delimara Power Station extension. Government is taking steps to relocate the 31st March 1979 Enemalta installation that receives directly from supply tankers, and store unleaded gasoline, diesel and Jet A1 so that Dr Franco Debono can tell his constituents at Birzebbugia that while he supports the power station extension he has managed to secure from government the relocation of the storage facility.
Dr Gonzi will do everything to remain in power. He will continue to show the same opportunism that won him the last general election with just 1,580 votes more than the Labour Party. In the 2008 electoral campaign GonziPN promised heaven on earth, gave jobs and promotions, granted building permits, handed out tax exemptions, deceived voters by promising everything to everyone and brought over thousands of voters who did not have the constitutional right to vote. There were still 147,331 who voted against the PN, 3,863 more than those who voted for the PN.
In his first speech after that election, which he won by the skin of his teeth, Gonzi urged all Maltese and Gozitans to leave a deeply divisive electoral campaign behind them and unite to move the country forward: “Let us not speak of winners and losers but about a country getting stronger and moving forward. We will be the government of all Maltese people, we are just one big family, and we do not have the luxury of dividing the country into two states. Nobody must lag behind. I will embrace the Opposition with open arms in dialogue.”
Elected with the majority of the voters against him, Dr Gonzi gave the impression two years ago that the PN was about to discover humility and seek to govern through dialogue, consultation and consensus. But it is very clear that the PN has only one definition of the word ‘consensus’: “support me and follow my decisions and no questions asked, take it or leave it.” Dr Gonzi has emptied the Malta Council for Social and Economic Development of any real consultation. The PN in government has done completely the opposite to what it promised two years ago. It is running the country like a one-party state behind a façade of a two-party parliamentary democracy, imposing its decisions and riding roughshod over all those who disagree with it.
Four years ago a commission appointed by the PN to analyse its defeat in the 2004 European parliament elections called on its leader Dr Lawrence Gonzi to renew the PN, to recover the party’s ‘soul’, to remove all the cronies appointed to top public posts and to give the people of Malta and Gozo a better life.
After extensive internal consultations within the PN, the commission had concluded that: “The biggest problem the PN had in this election was the middle class – the biggest class in the country and that extensive parts of it carry most of the burden of taxation and so they expect the country to be administered better and the country’s scarce resources to be used much better. Many associate ministries, government agencies, the civil service – government in a few words – with the squandering of money, lack of discipline, lack of will. Most of all it was made clear to us that government is not governing prudently and wisely, and showing its teeth with those who deserve it and that the country is run more by government officials than by government through its ministers.”
Four years have passed since these words were written and the middle class’s lot has worsened, as it was hit by painful water and electricity bills, lower purchasing power due to a poor performance in our main economic activities like tourism and manufacturing, and a general feeling that the hardworking many have to pay for the fruits of corruption enjoyed by a few very well-connected individuals.
Dr Gonzi has been running the PN for nearly six years. Enough time has passed to show that he has failed to revive the PN and give it a new lease of life. What the PN-appointed commission said four years ago is more relevant today: “the PN has been too long in government, surrounded by the same people, there are no new faces in the agencies and the parastatal corporations and the Cabinet. This can give the PN the image that its expiry date has passed, that it is cut off from reality and is not understanding the problems of people. The feeling that the PN is surrounded by cliques of persons whose appointment to such posts cannot be justified, is getting stronger not weaker.”
In its conclusions, the commission says that before the 2004 European Parliamentary elections the PN failed to take any new bold and imaginative initiatives to renew itself: “The Party should have started making itself seem to be on the side of the people, and not defend those who the people feel are responsible for wasting public funds, and for taking strange and unfair decisions, persons who are perceived by the general public, to be untouchable and who in most cases occupy positions they have neither the qualifications nor the skills for.”
The commission also stressed that the PN is not credible anymore for a growing number of people because of the extravagant electoral promises it had made: “many promises of every kind were made, promises that were not delivered. Many of the PN activists who spoke to the Commission expressed their concern that “the Party in Government had lost its ‘soul’… Even top party officials admitted to us that they feel that the PN has lost the ‘high moral ground’, which means that the party has cut itself off from the values it embraces.”
Do not expect Gonzi to do any soul searching and cure the deep malady of the PN, but expect him and his coterie to do all they can to hang on to power till 2013 and beyond.
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