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Loyalists trounce deputy leader Michael Falzon’s faction at executive committee elections
Labour leader Alfred Sant is expected today to tell his delegates his party is ready to go for an election and that the Nationalist government is not fit to govern any longer.
His enthusiasm will be marked by the victory his faction clinched in the party’s executive committee elections, after making significant inroads over deputy Michael Falzon’s faction.
On Friday night Sant’s aides set off a flurry of SMSs stating they had made a ‘clean sweep’ in the face-off between the two sides. But they were premature claims, coming shortly after Wenzu Mintoff beat with 60 per cent of the vote incumbent Aleks Farrugia, a Michael Falzon ally, for the post of education secretary in the party’s administration.
One News journalist Charlon Gouder, an Alfred Sant candidate backed by secretary general Jason Micallef and a gauge of his backer’s popularity, clinched a remarkable 72.5 per cent of votes. Last year he got 53.3 per cent.
Aleks Farrugia’s defeat had been expected, even though his campaign went into overdrive thanks to unrelenting campaigning by his sister-in-law Nathalie Attard, Michael Falzon’s assistant.
Attard did not contest this year’s election after being banned from standing and from entering the party’s newsroom, when last December she was accused of allegedly leaking details of a meeting between a group of building contractors and a high-ranking Labour delegation. Referred to as ‘the snake’ by Sant loyalists, Attard denied the allegations.
In the ensuing skirmish between both sides of the leadership divide, Alfred Sant has managed to keep a low profile although he is aware that the less the dissent is in his party, the bigger the chances for victory.
Although his faction is declaring victory over Falzon, the deputy leader’s acolytes have still managed to scrape through with Alfred Grixti and Gino Cauchi still getting elected with the same number of votes. Glenn Bedingfield, increasingly mistrusted by the Sant camp, will not get in this year.
And in the complicated structure of the Labour party’s myriad branches, committees and districts, many of those who are well known to disagree with Alfred Sant, namely Joe Zrinzo, the father of party president Stefan Zrinzo Azzopardi, will still get to the executive since he is a party representative of an electoral district. Alfred Sant’s faithful managed to wipe out the peril of deputy leader Michael Falzon’s ambitious faction on Friday night, when Labour’s new executive returned eight Sant loyalists from ten contested seats, and incumbent Aleks Farrugia – a Falzon supporter – lost the post of education secretary to Wenzu Mintoff aligned to the Sant faction.
In an evidently tense environment, party delegates were congregated in groups, discussing in hushed tones, their talk and body language exposing the factions they were supporting.
The scene at voting time was described by some as “ironic” when the broad-shouldered red jacket ushers were guiding delegates to prepare their paid-up membership cards for them to be able to vote. Ironic, because of the recent controversy that saw the party leadership turn a blind eye to secretary general Jason Micallef’s embarrassing blunder of “forgetting” to renew his party membership during these last three years.
Former diehard party president Manwel Cuschieri appeared from time to time, walking along the aisles inside the conference hall, and opportunistically keeping an eye on the voting process just outside the main entrance. Natalie Attard was also in the hall, seen on one occasion attending to the carriage of a box with votes and involving herself later on in the top heavy voting process.
While voting proceeded, the conference listened to a litany of three-minute speeches by delegates who dwelt on repeated political rhetoric, many of them falling prey to the Nationalist Party media pressure by replying to the series of stories leaked from deep within the party structures.
It was an uninspiring lot. One young delegate, harking back to Labour’s exercise in stark consumerism back in the 80s, lamented the dearth of employment around: “better having to go to Sicily to buy chocolate rather than going to Sicily to look for work.”
Deputy leader Charles Mangion’s 20-minute speech was interrupted by applause a mere three times, the first by Alfred Sant himself after almost 14 minutes of monologue. Replete with clichés from the British Labour Party’s suitcase, Mangion laced his speech with slogans such as “we are on your side. Your concern are our concerns” and “your values are our values”, or “the best is yet to come”.
Mangion admitted to sometimes “inventing excuses” to his constituents who seek him on his mobile phone, asking his audience to understand he is “very busy working to get the party to power.”
Platitudes and empty seats characterised the last part of the Labour conference on Thursday night after co-deputy leader Michael Falzon ended his uninspiring speech, repeating his nauseating promise that the MLP “will not just be an alternative government but a better one”.
Yes but how? The question remains unanswered even for those who bother reading through the policy reports, but Falzon just confirmed the awful lack of vision and drive needed to inspire the masses that are growing in their disillusionment with politics.
For Falzon, being bland is perhaps the safest bet, coming as he did in the wake of a massive fallout with Sant on the Nathalie Attard affair and the infamous leaks to the Nationalist press. So instead, he embarked on a litany of thank-yous to all those who accepted the MLP’s invitation for consultation as well as to the very Labour MPs who authored the policy reports on the family, the elderly, equality, youths and jobs, Falzon spent more time lauding his party for its past accomplishments and slamming the government than projecting what a Labour government might be doing in a year’s time. To young people, he promised raising the national insurance ceiling and to raise the ceiling on VATw refunds for expenses on their first home. He also promised that young people who set up business would not have to pay national insurance in their first two years – all measures that would further deplete public coffers without delving into alternative sources of funding. As to women, he said they would be entitled to 14 weeks of paid pregnancy leave, again without delving into the economic implications of such a measure.
Labour would “broaden the definition of the family,” Falzon added, while paradoxically dismissing in one fell swoop any possibility of entertaining divorce. “But let not those spinning stories about us deceive you. This would in no way mean that we are going to encourage alternatives to the family. We relish the Christian values of a democratic and Socialist party.”
Of course, the Labour delegates seated in front of him at the red and white hall in Mile End Road gave him their customary applauses prompted by his occasional heightened pitch, but their enthusiasm dissipated into nothingness immediately after the speech as they all fled out of the hall leaving the rest of the speakers facing a mass of empty chairs.
“With Labour, what you see is what you get,” Falzon said at one point in his speech.
He could not have been more spot on.
kschembri@mediatoday.com.mt |
