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JAMES DEBONO delves into the many thoughts storming the Prime Minister’s mind and asked historian Henry Frendo and former Finance Minister Lino Spiteri whether Lawrence Gonzi is getting his priorities right.
Asked if there was anything on his mind at the moment, the Prime Minister replies that “everything is on my mind”.
The long list in the man’s mind includes hefty items of responsibility at this particular point in his premiership and his party’s electoral stumble: restoring the party’s electoral fortunes, managing dissent in the party, defending his own men in the party, taking Malta into the eurozone, and most important of all – finding the Holy Grail of economic recovery.
Former Labour Minister of Finance Lino Spiteri notes that this is the major problem of the current Prime Minister. “The mind encompasses ‘everything’. No less a PM’s mind. But a Prime Minister has to set priorities.”
And yet, Gonzi still has to learn the skills of a political acrobat in order to break free of the contradictory pressures exerted on his still fragile leadership. Henry Frendo observes that he seems to be caught in a “pincer movement, between wanting to deliver and wanting to please. The question is what and who, and how soon.”
The Holy Grail
All this begs the question: has the Prime Minister set his priorities right?
Three years in advance of the next general elections, and Gonzi can, for the time being, afford the luxury and foibles of dissent in his party. Yet the future of the Prime Minister hinges on whether he is successful in his quest for the holy grail of economic recovery. Like a school boy who has failed in the mid-term examinations, most notably in a telling debacle at the local council elections and before that the European Parliament elections, Gonzi looks forward to make up for it in the annual exams in which he will either be promoted or demoted.
He admits that the local councils are a snapshot of what the situation is “at that point in time. If that snapshot is in accordance with what we thought it would be, then that is OK. The problem is if that snapshot fails to develop in the next three years when we have to face a general election which is the final test of a five-year legislature.”
In fact, only economic recovery can improve his party’s political fortunes, calm the waters of dissent within the party, and enable him to consolidate his leadership, which still lacks solid foundations.
But is Gonzi doing his homework well in order to pass the final exam? Will he succeed in leading the country towards a new age of economic prosperity?
According to Lino Spiteri, Gonzi has not set his priorities right in leading Malta out of the current economic rapids. The problem, according to Spiteri, is that Gonzi “seems to think that eco-contributions and other taxes will do the trick, along with adopting the euro.”
Gonzi lately reiterated in an interview in The Times his sense of urgency in adopting the euro by pointing out that other nine New Member States have already declared their strategy for joining the euro “and we know they will be competing with us.”
Spiteri is concerned about this sense of urgency: “We should also know, though, that getting the euro rate wrong will accelerate our loss of competitiveness.”
Bleak Prospects
Throughout the interview the Prime Minister made an effort to demonstrate that the island’s economic and financial prospects are not as bleak as they seem.
But according to Spiteri there is more to economic management than satisfaction at last year’s record number of people going abroad. “As if that boosted the domestic economy,” Spiteri scoffs. Unimpressed by the Prime Minister’s comment that in 2004 “we closed spot-on” with a targeted structural deficit of Lm94 million, Spiteri says that if Gonzi is truly being convinced by creative accounting “through juggling with the capital budget, he really does have too many things on his mind.”
As he struggles to improve his grades in economics, Gonzi must also pass the test of managing the ‘currents’ in his own party, the term he coined to describe the dissent within the Nationalist Party during his interview with The Times.
Optimistically Gonzi thinks that dissent in his own party will “help us to keep on our toes, help us to respond, to double check on what our policies are”, presumably referring to his leadership and the party’s so-far-unknown strategy group. They are bold words and somewhat unorthodox in the Maltese context. Fenech Adami never referred to the word ‘currents’ throughout his long reign as party leader. Before the leadership contest in 2004, the party’s administration went as far as forbidding public debates between the three contenders.
In Eddie’s shadow
Leading the party in the shadow of his predecessor is not an easy task for Gonzi. By the end of his long reign Fenech Adami had already become a sort of historical icon. The perception that Gonzi is just another common mortal has made it easier for critics to stand up to be counted.
The climate of economic uncertainty has also contributed to the opening of the floodgates of disgruntlement and dissent within the party. The explosive residue of an intense leadership contest which resulted in the downfall of a political heavyweight like John Dalli cannot be underestimated, and the current debate in the party is still overshadowed by last year’s leadership contest and the role of the party’s administration in that contest.
Yet Gonzi might be the first party leader to call a spade a spade. According to Henry Frendo ‘currents’ have always existed in Maltese politics.
“Close to a leadership contest, there are bound to be more currents, because party members would have mobilised in favour of one candidate or another. The same happened in the PN in 1977, then in the MLP in 1992. Both were in opposition then, however. In the case of the PN, Eddie Fenech Adami had been leader for decades, so Gonzi still needs time to establish his own sway, difficult though that is, particularly in the face of repeated electoral defeats, inherited cultural baggage, the civil service bureaucracy and generally difficult times economically.”
“His group of people”
The Times’ interviewer referred to a “campaign within his party being organised against his (Gonzi’s) group of people.” Rather than an ideological clash of ideas, between liberals and conservatives, the current conflict is perceived as a clash between personalities and their clans.
According to Henry Frendo, “different viewpoints should not be personalised unduly, at the cost of party unity. But ultimately contests are between persons, whether these concern ideas or positions. I think intra-party debate is as healthy and necessary as inter-party adversity, if kept within the limits of decency and goodwill.”
It is clear that the current contest is a personalised one between John Dalli’s camp and the current secretary-general Joe Saliba. Saliba’s quandary, after his strategy to pull out of the electoral contest in Zejtun and Marsa failed to give any visible results, could have been settled in an internal exercise of party accountability.
Yet the Prime Minister stood his ground in defending “his group of people” in the party – the local election results had “nothing to do with the general secretary or the party” but with decisions the people “did not appreciate”, and “measures that hit people’s pockets.”
Back to the past
Back in 1998, in an interview with In-Nazzjon, the then secretary-general of the PN Lawrence Gonzi attributed the 1996 defeat to a “communication problem which dated back a while.”
In fact, the same problem seems to pervade the present administration when embarking on major reforms like the eco-contribution. Yet, the “arrogant citizen” syndrome, which created the communication problem before 1996, has returned with a vengeance to haunt the PN again.
In the past the PN has responded to electoral setbacks by embarking on changes in the party’s structure. After losing the 1996 election, the party had no qualms about embarking on a ruthless changing-of-the-guard in the administration, which led to Gonzi’s election as secretary-general.
Back in 1997, Gonzi rejected the notion that the party had lost the election because it was becoming too liberal. “If anything we lost the liberal vote,” he said referring to small businessmen. A major reform introduced by Gonzi would be the introduction of a secretariat for the self-employed.
What makes the June 2004 and March 2005 setbacks peculiar is that these electoral setbacks occurred with the PN still in government. It is far easier to make changes in the opposition than in government. In 1997 Gonzi had far less on his mind.
Yet it is clear that 2003 was an end of a cycle for the PN. It signalled the death of the big life-and-death political issues and the beginning of a new and more elastic phase of politics where bouts of disgruntlement can switch the pendulum from one side to another.
jdebono@newsworksltd.com
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