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The Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi has turned to two of Eddie Fenech Adami’s prime political advisors in a bid to regain lost electoral ground. Former University rector Fr Peter Serracino Inglott and Malta’s Permanent Representative to the EU, Richard Cachia Caruana, are now full participants in the PN’s strategy group after an absence of three years.
Serracino Inglott is widely considered a long-time ideologue and the originator of several Nationalist party electoral programmes. He will definitely serve to bring a wealth of experience back into the strategy group.
Oblivious to any conflict with his role as Malta’s ambassador to the European Union in Brussels, Richard Cachia Caruana’s presence is expected to bring strategic planning in the Nationalist core group, and more importantly to sift and identify the problematic niche groups whose concerns need to be addressed.
The eight members of the strategy group, recently seen entering the Girgenti summer palace, include the Prime Minister, PN secretary general Joe Saliba, information secretary Gordon Pisani, political editor John Zammit, and cabinet ministers Austin Gatt and Louis Galea.
The choice of venue for the meeting, which serves as the Prime Minister’s summer residence, serves to further cloud any distinction between party and state affairs.
Although Serracino Inglott and Cachia Caruana are old-timers, their presence has served to invigorate the strategy group. Both are veterans of strategy groups for six national elections, those of 1981,1987, 1992, 1996, 1998 and 2003. They were instrumental in fine-tuning the PN’s strategy during these campaigns.
When Lawrence Gonzi was elected as leader of the Prime Minister in 2004, the strategy group was loosely restructured and excluded the two heavyweights. Since then, the Nationalists have failed to win a single round of local council elections, and more importantly also lost the 2004 European parliamentary elections.
The new strategy group has a gargantuan task ahead of it in view of current opinion surveys, which consistently point towards a Labour majority. Today’s MaltaToday survey indicates that the MLP is leading by six points, though it also reconfirms the presence of a large percentage of undecided voters. |
