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The Labour leader has defiantly clung to his position for 14 years and is now feeling the need for a new makeover. Karl Schembri reports
Alfred Sant is back to business. Speaking to the crop of businessmen and union leaders last Tuesday he told his audience “everything should be fast tracked” in his latest pro-business pledge to scrap bureaucracy and get government to deliver.
He was speaking at a business breakfast organised by his own party with the unproblematic question to which the answer is utterly obvious: Malta Today, need for a New Plan?
With the answer clearly taken to be ‘yes’, Sant was supposedly outlining his vision of branding Malta as a business hub, but what he set out to do was to re-brand his party as the businessmen’s ally.
It is all explored territory for Sant, the architect of the repackaged Labour party since 1992 when he reached out to the middle and business classes to win the 1996 general election. But since his bloody duel with Mintoff and ensuing fall from government, New Labour has lost all its glamour and fluff, with Sant establishing himself as a record loser at general elections but a defiant survivor at the helm of his party.
Now he has a couple of local electoral victories, a majority of Labour candidates at the European Parliament, and surveys showing he is making inroads with the younger generation although Lawrence Gonzi is still the most trusted political leader across generations.
The MaltaToday trust barometer for April showed Sant enjoying 3 per cent more trust than Gonzi among voters under 44, with the MLP enjoying an overall relative majority of 47 per cent against the PN’s 45 per cent in the wake of last month’s landslide local elections victory.
It is therefore now high time for some repackaging and just looking at this weekend’s activities for May Day celebrations, it is evident that the re-branding exercise is in full swing.
While the PN has abandoned its traditional Ta’ Qali venue and confined itself to a two-hour conference tomorrow at the Phoenicia Hotel – afraid it will have a poor turnout like last year – the MLP has taken over the fields at the national park with a “programme for all the family, especially children” according to Jason Micallef, with activities ranging from BMX and skate board shows to Tae Kwon Do and gymnastics exhibitions, to the background music of Ira Losco and her friends.
Very red indeed. More pinkish actually, the kind of brainwaves brought over by the new secretary-general, Jason Micallef. While Workers’ Day mobilises global demonstrations, the Malta Labour Party organises an extended family picnic – usually a Nationalist idea springing out of its pater familias tradition embodied in Eddie Fenech Adami.
Micallef – the former TV gardening show host – is media savvy and obsessed with image although ideologically challenged. He has somehow softened Sant’s aloof image although just like Sant, he views the independent press with strong suspicion, brought up as he is expecting everyone to either tow the party line or else be by default on the other side.
Sant’s deputies, Charles Mangion and Michael Falzon, are upbeat and loyal, with the former not batting much of an eyelid after being caught out signing the Pender Place sale after he slammed it as a bad deal.
But what is Sant’s new message? When you filter all the corporate speak, you end up with crass emptiness, deliberately intended to veer the party from any commitments that would bind a future Labour government. A plan is obviously needed in the current mess we’re in, but just saying a plan is needed is the sort of thing every armchair critic is saying.
His plan for tourism, for example, boils down to setting up a task force that would address the problems in six months’ time. On pensions, the party has stifled any policy discussion until its policy report is drawn up – a convenient way to avoid mess-ups by different speakers but also a sure way of repressing political debate out in the open, to the extent that nobody from the MLP is taking a stand on pensions. And the biggest challenge for the country is to achieve an economic growth rate of three to four per cent a year, according to Sant, but how he will go about it remains another question, ideally to be answered in one of his forthcoming glossy policy reports. And even if he manages to do that, will the economic prosperity trickle down to the working class?
Promising to “fast track everything” on the other hand is a vague and dangerous pledge, possibly meaning that Labour would also scrap impact assessments required for every major development – a point which the Nationalists also seem to agree with judging by the loud interventions made at the PN’s general council in Gozo earlier this month almost calling for the disbanding of MEPA.
Beyond the colourful packaging, the voters in the next election will have to decide between Sant – with a history of a tried and aborted administration – and Gonzi’s geriatric Cabinet. The result will prove whether Sant’s and his party’s insistence on keeping him at the helm was mere foolish defiance.
kschembri@mediatoday.com.mt
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