What is the PN waiting for to change leader, anyway? The Zombie Apocalypse?

Ok, let me get this straight. Back in October 2020, the Nationalist Party felt it was ‘the right time’ to change its leader, roughly midway through his first term: despite the fact that – unlike Bernard Grech, two years later - Adrian Delia had not just lost an election by a landslide (in fact, he wasn’t even given the chance to contest one at all).

Naturally, I won’t bore you with all the real reasons for his removal, two years ago; suffice it to say, for now, that Adrian Delia found himself facing a rebellion by roughly half his parliamentary group; and as newly-elected MP Mark Anthony Sammut told me in an interview, back then: “we know that, without making this change, we [would] end up going into an election asking ourselves whether we will lose by 40, 50, 60 or 70,000 votes….”

And, well… fair enough, I suppose. After all, that prediction wasn’t exactly ‘pulled out of hat’, you know (actually, it was based on one of this newspaper’s own surveys). And besides:  as a general rule of thumb, party leaders who lose the trust of ‘roughly half their parliamentary group’, also tend not to have rather shot life-spans anyway.

It is, let’s face it, the same reason why so many other party leaders, all over the world, have been known to take a tumble, every once in a while (for further details, look under ‘Brown, Gordon’… or, more recently, ‘Corbyn, Jeremy’).

No, what I wanted to ‘get straight’ is something entirely different. For in case nobody else has noticed: that self-same prediction – which Sammut presented as the very ‘worst-case scenario’, please note - has now more or less come to fruition, right under our very noses.

On paper, the Nationalist Party has just lost an election by a tidy 39,500 votes – i.e., almost within the scope of Sammut’s forecast: and in any case, the PN’s most catastrophic defeat since 1955 – but not only that: the voter-turnout was also the lowest since Independence, by far.

In other words, the PN managed to somehow widen its gap with Labour by around 4,250 votes… in an election where a staggering 61,000 people didn’t bother voting at all.

But wait, it gets weirder still: for in the same election, the Labour Party also somehow managed to lose around 8,000 votes… and yet, still end up with an even larger majority, notwithstanding.

Mathematically, none of that should even make any sense at all: until you realise, of course, that – while the Labour Party lost those 8,000 votes mostly to abstention - the PN lost theirs (over 12,000, by the way) mostly to…  drums rolling… why, the Labour Party, no less!

How else can we possibly explain the above paradox - whereby Labour increased its majority, whilst also decreasing its overall share of the vote – if not by the fact that a significant chunk of (formerly Nationalist) voters, actually compensated Labour for some of its own lost support? And even then: in sufficient numbers, for that party to achieve the unthinkable… and (quite undeservingly, it must be said) beat its own electoral record, for a straight third time in a row?

No, no, make no mistake: even if the 39,500 mark falls slightly short of the ‘40, 50, 60 or 70,000’ predicted by Mark Anthony Sammut in 2020… the result itself remains every bit as Apocalyptic.

It’s not just that Nationalist voters abandoned their own party in droves (that happened to Labour, too)… it’s that a giant slice of them evidently preferred ‘voting Labour’, to all the other available options: including ‘voting for third parties’ (of which there was more of an abundance than usual); or, very simply, ‘not voting at all’.

Hate to say it, but that can only be described as a wholesale rejection of the Nationalist Party, by an unprecedented majority of the Maltese electorate. And that, on its own, should be more than justification enough, for the PN (or indeed any political party, anywhere in the entire democratic world) to want to ‘change leader’, at this precise juncture in time.

But… wha-hey-hey, what do you know?  The same Nationalist Party that was so very eager to depose an untried, untested leader back in 2020 – on the basis of the dismal election results he ‘might have’ achieved, had he been allowed to stay on – now miraculously comes to the clean opposite conclusion (and when faced with the materialisation of those same results, too. Funny, huh?)

And of all people, it just had to be Mark Anthony Sammut to put this (entirely new) line of reasoning into words: “In the year-and-a-half he has been leader, Bernard Grech made important changes, including the regeneration of the parliamentary group, and I believe he should be allowed to continue building on this foundation […]  Despite the result, we should not throw away all that has been achieved, or the vision outlined in the electoral programme, which can be built upon …”

But tell you what: I’ll cut Mark Anthony Sammut some slack from now on… if nothing else, because he is hardly the first politician to have ever been caught out in a classic case of double-standards (nor even the worst example, by a VERY long shot).

And in any case: since when has the opinion of one, solitary Nationalist Party exponent – even if widely regarded as a possible future PN leader himself – ever really amounted to a hill of beans, at the end of the day? (I mean: just look at all the ones who had said almost exactly the same thing – in almost exactly the same words, too! – about Adrian Delia, back in 2020. What weight did their collective opinion really have, at the end of the day? None at all, of course...)

BUT… Mark Anthony Sammut is not the only Nationalist Party exponent to suddenly reason this way. Leaving aside that even Pierre Portelli (himself a Delia loyalist, during the ‘insurrection’) now publicly urges Bernard Grech to stay on… there is also the glaring fact that – at the time of writing, anyway – not a single contender has so far stepped forward, to actually challenge Grech for that role (no, not even after he physically delivered precisely the same sort of electoral disaster, that Adrian Delia had been deposed for just ‘hypothetically representing’…)

And if that remains the case, all the way down to the leadership election itself… which wouldn’t even be much of an ‘election’ at all, would it?….then…

I don’t know: how much ‘worse’ can a ‘worst-case scenario’ even get, anyway? If losing an election by a historic margin is no longer enough, for a political party leader to get himself… ooh, let’s see now: ‘politely shown the door’, perhaps?… then what the bleeding heck does he even need to do, anyway? Unleash the Zombie Apocalypse…?

Come on, it’s ridiculous, and you all know it.

If ever there was a ‘right time’ – not to mention ‘every political justification under the sun ‘– for the Nationalist Party to finally take the bull by the horns, and give itself the good old-fashioned ‘shake-up’ that the electorate has so very clearly demanded, in this particular election…

… surely, that time is ‘now’. Right this very minute, in fact. And even for the same reasons Mark Anthony Sammut himself gave us two years ago: i.e., to avoid a truly ‘worst-case scenario’, where the PN really does end up losing n ‘by 40, 50, 60 or 70,000 votes’, or more (assuming, of course, that it survives long enough to even contest in 2027. There are, after all, both local and MEP elections in the meantime…)

For let’s face it, folks: if the PN really does choose to cling to Bernard Grech, regardless of the electoral verdict; and regardless, for that matter, that he not only failed in his self-appointed mission to ‘narrow the gap’; but even managed to increase it by over 4,000 votes… how would that actually go down, with an electorate that has only just sent out such a clear, unequivocal message (to both parties, true: but to the PN more than most)?

More specifically: how would it go down, with the one category of voter whose support the PN most desperately needs to win back… if it is to stand even the remotest of fighting chances, in five years’ time?

How would all those disgruntled former PN voters – the ones who voted Labour two weeks ago, remember? – interpret the party’s actual response… if not as precisely the same sort of ‘we-know-best’ arrogance, that had originally pushed them all away to begin with?

To my mind, there is no doubt about it whatsoever: they would see it as a classic case of being shown the middle finger… by the same people, please note, who had booted out their own preferred choice of leader, just two short years ago (and for so very much less, in their view…)

Now: I’ll assume that, to have read so far, you must possess at least some kind of vague interest in local politics; so surely, you must know the score as well as I do, by now.

There are certain things in life that no political party – once again, anywhere in the entire democratic world (and no: having ‘God on your side’ won’t help, either) – can possibly be expected to survive, in the long run. And… well, ‘flipping your middle-finger at the electorate’ just so happens to be one of them.

Just sayin’, that’s all…