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While Eddie boasts of taking Malta into Europe, Sant still waxes nostalgically about the Bugibba promenade – KARL SCHEMBRI asks whether Sant is electable
With Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici’s raucous gate-crashing at the Malta Labour Party meetings on the EU Constitution still in the air, the French and Dutch ‘No’ votes were just what Alfred Sant needed to make his life easier at the helm of his party.
Just when the Labour leader decided, for once, to take a stand, this time in favour of the European Constitution with all the ensuing internal troubles, it turns out that the whole exercise of meeting delegates and trying to persuade them to welcome this unwanted document was futile and useless.
Europe, it can be said, is Sant’s greatest source of colossal political misjudgements. He still insists that the No camp won the referendum, ignoring altogether the fact that his self-illusory persistence landed him yet another electoral defeat in 2003.
Since then, he says today in an interview with MaltaToday in one of his repetitive expressions, he has won three elections, none of which, mind you, gave him any power whatsoever but which somehow consolidated his position within his party.
Internally, Sant is indeed a survivor who has managed to hold on to the top party post while all those around him in the upper echelons fell one by one, even though a good part of the Labour hardcore cannot understand Sant’s sudden bout of Euro-enthusiasm.
Strategically, since he lost his government in 1998, he has never recovered in mobilising a majority behind Labour to get elected to Castille, but he kept enough loyalists around him to save himself from a clear beheading.
Now he speaks confidently as though a national election victory for his party is inevitable in three years’ time or earlier. As if to confirm that he has learnt nothing from his strategic mistakes, he refers to 1996-1998 when asked what he stands for – the shortest-lived government in post-war Maltese politics. While Eddie boasts of having steered Malta into Europe, Sant boasts of the Bugibba promenade project.
But really, is Sant electable?
His answer is that Labour does things better than the Nationalists. No hint of left and right or shades of red in the party that used to honour Chinese and North Korean leaders, no fundamental reasons therefore to get Labour into government.
That may be unfair. Sant is essentially different, not just from the Nationalists, but from anything else that is Maltese. The Harvard PhD is at his best on his Wednesday Times columns – last Wednesday’s was exceptional – whenever he debunks the irrational, mediaeval mix of Maltese politics and religion. His articulate arguments on the English language daily however find no translation into political leadership elsewhere, or rarely so.
That would mean that at the end of this political race the electorate will be faced with a question of trust, more than anything else. Gonzi’s policies will be up for scrutiny, his economic measures will be held against the test of effectiveness and a good part of his Cabinet ministers are already an abysmal disappointment, but Sant will only have an aborted government on his CV and reports upon reports made of promises and words.
karl@newsworksltd.com
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