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Karl Schembri
With a colossal electoral defeat staring them in the eye, the 80-odd PN executive members ended their four-hour trite post-mortem meeting at the Fleur de Lys party club last Thursday night to a ringing applause, shouting and stamping in approval of their leader.
It was just four days since Lawrence Gonzi said he was taking note of the message given to him by the angry electorate, but in front of his men gathered for the closed doors meeting that lasted till 10pm he just asked for their unconditional backing with a rhetorical question.
“Does this executive stand behind me?” he told the executive members at the end of his speech, before the rabble roared. “I will only win if I have the executive behind me.”
According to Gonzi, in the last 24 months he got the country where he wanted.
“Give me another 24 months and I’ll get the party where we want it,” he said, two years ahead of the general election.
Lamenting that in this election all odds were against the PN, Gonzi slammed the parish priest of Victoria, Gozo, whom he accused of spreading leaflets urging people not to vote PN.
“At one point I was thinking of coming out to condemn him,” Gonzi said.
His deputy, Tonio Borg, who last year coined the phrase “voting with their feet” to describe those who abstained in the election, blamed once again the low voter turnout for the PN’s defeat, insisting there was no shift to Labour.
With nobody pointing fingers at anyone and not one dissenting voice towards government policy, Secretary General Joe Saliba made his customary presentation of figures and percentages uninterrupted. The most he got was some generic talk about his lack of damage control, given that he knew about the extent of the defeat beforehand through his regularly commissioned surveys.
“I don’t have the formula for winning,” Saliba admitted, “but if you want us to lose then all you have to do is to go and spread what has been discussed here”.
John Dalli criticised the party leadership in general without making any references.
“We have a lot of hooks (granpuni) to pin the defeat to,” he said, referring to pensions, the water and electricity surcharge and “hasty decisions” taken at one go.
He said Nationalists were no longer feeling at home at the Dar Centrali, and warned against certain directors in the civil service who may be undermining the government – a claim made repeatedly by Alfred Sant to explain great part of the reason for his downfall from government.
The same point was echoed in other interventions, with some even saying that MEPA was making the PN lose its votes.
Dalli also attacked Gonzi’s property tax amendments made in the last budget, describing them as “a mess up (tbazwira) as bad as Alfred Sant’s removal of VAT”.
Peter Darmanin was trembling in his emotional intervention, sources said, and George Pullicino told the people locked inside the PN club about a Sliema citizen who told him he never voted in local elections before but voted PN this time as a statement “against the egoism of Qui Si Sana residents”.
MP David Agius said it was high time the party thought of its partisans, using cuddly metaphors to make his point (nikkokkolaw in-Nazzjonalisti). He was also critical of the fact that the party did not call people to remind them to vote on election day – a decision taken by Saliba on the suspicion that it would backfire among disgruntled voters.
Others spoke about the “need to start giving back” (nibdew inroxxu), in not so subtle suggestions for more favouritism to win back disgruntled PN voters.
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