Malta Business Review ANALYSIS & DEBATE Delia and his followers have generally seemed more interested in controlling the machinery of the Nationalist Party than in seeking office. PN Leader Adrian Delia – most unpopular opposition leader after two years in recent decades INTRANSIGENT LEADER Intransigent Party By George Carol The intransigence of the Nationalist Party counsellors and the intransigence of its leader, in their attitude, they are actually more likely to bring about the very thing that they want to avoid. Firstly, the intransigence of the leader of the Opposition to step down for various reasons already highlighted by <strong>MBR</strong> is betraying both his party and the country. It was meant to be the Nationalist Party that devoted this summer to a long, postelectoral mortem on a humbling and disastrous defeat and divisive leadership contest. Yet somehow, in another twist to the extraordinary political drama of recent weeks, it is the Nationalist Party that faces this crisis of introversion. The Nationalist Party’s decline is a parable of political bad decisions, mismanagement, infighting, self-greed, pride and vulnerability, the brittleness of its own past success. Thirty years ago I interviewed the late President Dr Guido Demarco just following Labour’s sixteen year tenure in Government. His objective was to gain huge tracts of the political spectrum, especially by appealing to disenchanted Labour and Mintoffian voters. “I can’t believe that if you are a One-Nation PN looking at Labour this week,” he said, “and then turning your attention to the Nationalist Party next week, that you can have any doubt where you are better off.” Fast forward to 2019, (New) Labour sweeping to power with yet another record landslide victory. Compare and contrast Gonzi’s expansionist confidence in 2006 to Delia’s position in 2019. Far from declaring an end of ‘politics of division’ and feebly calling on detractors to join reform, the Nationalist Party is now retreating into a soggy little bivouac. Instead of appealing to those who do not traditionally vote PN, it is defending a shrinking electoral base and also attempting to limit the damage. Without a change of leadership – and course – the party will struggle to keep the 30 seats it presently holds in the 2022 general election (and is already expected to suffer losses as a result of the party’s intransigence to open its doors, restructure, re-build and attract). Next stop, catastrophe. How to explain this slump? Ideology has a lot to do with it, in spite of the insistence by mutinous MPs that it is all about “competence”. The election of Delia this year completed the transformation of the Nationalist Party from a centrist Christian democratic force to a radical grassroots anti-democracy with no apparent commitment to building a broad electoral coalition, or to reconcile aspiration with compassion and honesty. Indeed, Delia and his followers have generally seemed more interested in controlling the machinery of the Nationalist Party than in seeking office. This reflects a poverty of ambition, certainly, but it positions them in a battle over the PN’s nature that has lasted more than a century. Indeed, nobody knows better than the former PN General Secretary, Dr Louis Galea, how hard it is to drag the party from one of its bouts of self-indulgence back into the realm of responsible politics. By refusing to resign — in spite of his MPs’ dissent, in spite of polling data suggesting that he is by far the most unpopular Opposition leader after two years in recent decades — Delia is treating the PN as a fiefdom rather than a precious trust. He is betraying the very party history by which he claims to be so moved. As a veteran of the Fenech Adami-Gonzi era put it to me: “I do wonder if the PN is slowly dying.” His thesis was that the party had fulfilled its historic mission, was now bumping against the walls of redemption and transformation like a zombie, and that a new social democratic force would emerge to take its place in its own time: not a split, but a phoenix. This is a bleak prospect, to say the least, for those who need a PN government now. The party may yet step back from the lip of the abyss. But what struck me most forcefully about the veteran’s prophecy was its sheer plausibility. Only six years since it left office, it is no longer absurd to speak of the death of the PN. <strong>MBR</strong> Ref: https://www.standard.co.uk/ comment/comment/matthew-danconajeremy-corbyn-s-intransigence-isbetraying-both-his-party-and-thecountry-a3300276.html 8
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