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At first glance one finds little in common between the sober dove Lino Spiteri and the verbose and politically hawkish John Dalli, except for the fact that both hail from the baker’ town, Hal-Qormi.
Whilst the former cultivated an image of a moderate socialist who expressed his more idealistic and intellectual side in writing novels, the latter has been at his best in belittling his opponents in his colourful political speeches. While Lino Spiteri’s political baptism of fire was the imposition of mortal sin in the 1960s, Dalli’s first social commitment was in the MUSEUM. And yet at a closer look at the similarities between the two men are as striking as their differences.
Business Friendly
Unlike most of their colleagues Dalli and Spiteri did not belong to the medical and legal professions. Both had to struggle in the business and financial fields in order to gain their status in Maltese society. In fact they owe their business-friendly reputation to their experience in the private sector. John Dalli started his career as financial controller at Bluebell. Later he worked with the same company in Brussels.
Dalli was also a consultant in various other companies in the private sector. Up to 1970 Lino Spiteri was research officer with the Malta Chamber of Commerce. In 1973 he became chairman of the Central Bank of Malta. Later Spiteri served as financial management consultant mostly to manufacturing concerns. Today he sits on the board of a number of companies including Medavia, Tumas Finance and Bortex.
Under the Patriarchs
Both politicians started their political career serving under the leadership of imposing and historical political leaders. Lino Spiteri was elected to parliament at the young age of 24 when Duminku Mintoff led the party. He also served as Mintoff’s finance minister between 1981 and 1983. Spiteri also served as minister of trade and economic planning under Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici between 1983 and 1987.
Dalli was a member of the cabinet in all four administrations led by Eddie Fenech Adami. After a short spell as parliamentary secretary for industry and minister for economic affairs he was Malta’s finance minister for 14 whole years.
Both Dalli and Spiteri had an ambivalent relationship with the patriarchs of Maltese politics. While Spiteri was never exactly in line with Mintoff’s bizarre style of politics, Dalli – although extremely close to Fenech Adami – was never regarded as his anointed one for the leadership succession.
Thwarted ambitions
The most striking similarity between the two politicians is that both had their leadership ambitions thwarted by relative newcomers in their respective parties. Their future inter-party rivals, Lawrence Gonzi for John Dalli and Alfred Sant for Lino Spiteri, contested their first elections in 1987. A year later they both found a place in Parliament without being elected. While Lawrence Gonzi was Fenech Adami’s choice as speaker, Alfred Sant was co-opted as an MP.
Both Dalli and Spiteri were protagonists on the opposite camps in the turbulent 1980s. Yet both Dalli and Spiteri ended up losing to the two upstarts. Lino Spiteri and John Dalli ended up in second place in their parties’ three-way leadership contests. Lino Spiteri was much closer to being elected leader than Dalli as he had more votes than Alfred Sant in the first round of the vote. Spiteri ended up losing in the second round.
Although technically Dalli could have forced a second round with Lawrence Gonzi, he understandably gave up as the margin between him and Gonzi was insurmountable. While Gonzi had the backing of 59.3 per cent of PN councillors, only 25.3 per cent voted for Dalli.
Both leadership contests proved highly controversial. On the very day of the MLP leadership contest, a letter containing allegations against Lino Spiteri was sent to the MLP’s vigilance board was leaked to the Nationalist media. Before the vote was taken, Sant acolyte Manwel Cuschieri raised the issue in the MLP conference.
The leadership contest in the PN was also the subject of intense controversy. Much to Dalli’s consternation the party had forbidden public debates between the three contestants. The Dalli camp was also furious at the publication of public opinion polls a few days before the contest, which showed that Gonzi was more popular among the general public. On the eve of the PN’s leadership contest election councillors received emails and calls reminding them of past allegations made by the MLP, which put Dalli in a bad light.
Another similarity between Spiteri and Dalli is that both of them served very short spells as ministers in governments led by their respective party rivals. While Spiteri served for only six months as Alfred Sant’s Minister of Finance, Dalli served only for less than four months as Lawrence Gonzi’s Foreign Minister.
Resignations
A notable difference between the two is that they resigned for completely different reasons. In his letter of resignation Spiteri cited personal reasons and declared that when he had accepted his post he had informed Sant that he would do so only temporarily.
On the other hand, John Dalli’s resignation was tendered after five weeks of controversy surrounding allegations that Dalli exercised ministerial influence to get Iran’s national shipping line IRISL to set up business with his son-in-law’s shipping firm.
The Prime Minister had accepted Dalli’s resignation although according to him the allegations regarding IRISL remained unsubstantiated. In his letter, Dalli said that as a government front-liner taking important decisions he was used to “continuous attacks” from the Labour Party, but this was “the first time” he faced “attacks from different quarters”. He said he would remain a government backbencher. “The strategies plotted against me in the last weeks from different quarters created circumstances under which, I feel, I cannot work effectively,” Dalli wrote. “That is why I am submitting my resignation as government minister.”
On the backbench
While the motivations for their respective resignations were completely different one cannot but note a degree of similarity in their behaviour as backbenchers in parliament.
After resigning Lino Spiteri started speaking his mind on issues like the removal of VAT and the European Union. Both Spiteri and Dalli used their newspaper columns in The Times to voice their criticism.
Surprisingly the secular-minded Spiteri also declared that he would not support a divorce bill in parliament, as this was not part of the MLP’s 1996 manifesto.
While eight years ago Spiteri directed most of his criticism towards Alfred Sant’s policies, Dalli’s present criticism is mainly directed at the party’s administration. In November 2004 while addressing the party’s general council, Dalli warned that there are “many Nationalist diehards who have made so many sacrifices and who have worked incessantly to build what we have today, who are overwhelmed with frustration as they are feeling rejected in their own home.”
Like Spiteri, Dalli used his weekly column on The Sunday Times to criticise various government decisions. Dalli first voiced his criticism in late summer on the way the eco-contribution was implemented. A few months later, in the wake of the presentation of Gonzi’s first budget, Dalli criticised the government for missing a whole year in addressing the country’s financial problems. In February Dalli also wrote that the curbing of public holidays would not be enough to bolster Malta’s competitiveness and that Malta deserved better.
Ironically on that occasion both Dalli and Spiteri were referred to as armchair critics by parliamentary secretary Tonio Fenech during TV programme Int X’Tahseb?
During the last council meeting of the PN, Dalli crossed swords with Minister Dolores Christina and with MEP Simon Busuttil on the issue of positive discrimination. Finally last week, in the wake of heavy PN losses in the recent local elections, John Dalli launched a scathing attack on the party’s secretary-general Joe Saliba whom he accused of treating “party activists as people with no intelligence.”
Helping the enemy?
Both Dalli and Spiteri suffered the humiliating fate of providing ammunition for the propaganda machine of the opposing party.
In 1998 Spiteri, together with Alex Sciberras Trigona and former MLP deputy leader George Abela, was depicted in a PN pre-election billboard entitled “Ma Alfred Sant Ma Tahdimx” (You cannot function with Alfred Sant).
Last February during a mass meeting, Alfred Sant quelled Labour supporters’ booing as he uttered John Dalli’s name, not to denigrate him but to use his arguments to attack the Gonzi government. Dalli’s name was not just mentioned once but three times, surprisingly given that Dalli was always on the receiving end of Sant’s criticism especially on allegations of corruption regarding Daewoo and the HSBC privatisation.
Yet Lino Spiteri’s criticism of the MLP was less vociferous than Dalli’s. Spiteri never tried to use the fact that Alfred Sant was relying on an unstable single seat majority to his advantage. Spiteri’s dissent was in fact eclipsed by Dom Mintoff’s outright mutiny in the summer of 1998. Spiteri did not contest the 1998 election when he declared that his political career was over.
In subsequent years Spiteri continued to make public pronouncements in his newspaper columns. In 2000 the pandora box of the MLP’s 1992 leadership was reopened but Spiteri made no attempt to challenge the leadership again.
Will John Dalli follow Spiteri’s example by retiring from politics? Some could interpret Dalli’s attacks on the party’s administration as a case of sour grapes following his heavy defeat in the leadership contest. On the other hand Dalli’s constant appeal to the party’s grassroots is an indication that Dalli is far from resigned to retiring from the political centre-stage.
Closing ranks?
Maybe this would be the hardest choice in a country not used to internal party criticism. The Labour Party has a turbulent history of inner party conflicts and dissent characterised by tempestuous clashes involving personalities like Pawlu Boffa, Dom Mintoff, Pawlu Carachi, Joe Micallef Stafrace, Lino Briguglio, Wenzu Mintoff, Toni Abela, Alex Sciberras Trigona, Tony Nicholl, George Abela, Joe Brincat, Alfred Mifsud and Lino Spiteri himself. Within the Labour Party these clashes were nearly always resolved by the expulsion or the resignation of the dissidents from the party. Some of the dissidents like Wenzu Mintoff, Toni Abela and Joe Brincat were later accepted back within the party’s fold.
On the other hand there were few visible conflicts in the PN during the Fenech Adami era.
The only notable exception was the clash between Josie Muscat’s more militant approach and Eddie Fenech Adami’s more moderate approach in the aftermath of the 1981 election. The towering personality of Eddie Fenech Adami who like Moses led his party in the wilderness of the 1980s, acted as a stumbling block that stifled internal debate.
In fact the first cracks in the PN to become publicly visible appeared in the aftermath of Gonzi’s election as leader. Ironically the first decision to be publicly criticised by PN-friendly columnists like Marisa Micallef Leyson and Lou Bondì was Gonzi’s decision to make Fenech Adami President.
While one of Sant’s greatest weaknesses was his inability to manage dissent in his own party, Lawrence Gonzi still has to prove himself on this score. It would be to Gonzi’s credit if he succeeds in managing dissent by addressing its roots rather than by stifling it. This could be another step towards a Europeanisation of Maltese politics. Yet Gonzi’s display of self-righteousness and business-as-usual approach in the wake of heavy losses in recent local elections does not augur well for his ability to hold the party together. |
