The PN leadership contest

The sprint to the starting blocks is almost over. The Nationalist Party leadership campaign will soon see the two contestants—Alex Borg and Adrian Delia—take up their position on the start line to as they wait for the formal race to kick off. 

Borg is an untried and untested candidate, while Adrian Delia, who had already served as PN leader for a short period before being unfairly and undemocratically ousted, was never given a chance to prove himself. 

The two contestants will be parading their wares with daring long-form interviews and op-eds designed to rouse the grassroots or plug a perceived policy weakness. But coming out on top requires guile and cunning as well as political skill. 

Probably we will be hearing a lot about what will be going on till the end be it intrigue, plotting, phone calls, quiet chats, guesswork and claims of underhanded tactics. There will be rumours that all sorts of jiggery-pokery are going on. 

Probably by now, both will already have a campaign manager in place, with their respective campaigns starting to gather momentum. More substantially, they may need to plug some perceived holes in their policy image, particularly on hot-button issues like putting the party’s finances in order and then tackle major problems like immigration, the environment, rampant construction, the national debt and the new economic model. 

Behind the scenes, the two contenders might be reciprocally hoping that the other states something spectacularly and embarrassingly dumb so that he is forced to drop out of the race. 

I know what you might be thinking—pull yourself together; this is a vote to determine who will become the next Opposition leader. It is not exactly the race to Castille. But it is, nonetheless, a crunch moment. 

Among those of the anti-Delia faction, there will be some who will be quick to voice their anger that a candidate they rejected just a few years ago has again been foisted upon them by the due diligence entity of the party. 

As for those judging Borg, they will surely take into consideration the seemingly founded allegation that he unforgivingly went back on his word that he would not stand in the way of Delia’s return to the helm of the party. His reliability and consistency, or otherwise, will therefore play a pivotal role in the choice to be made between the two. 

On more than one occasion, the PN found to its cost but never took stock of it, the problem of members electing a leader who does not enjoy the support of a majority of the electorate. 

This leadership contest risks getting morphed into a bitter head-to-head struggle. Sabotage is an undeniable fact of party life. The PN needs to adopt a strategy to prevent opposing factions from engaging in sabotage rather than enhancing the party's image. Should this leadership contest turn bitter, the scars it will leave will take time to heal and continue denting the party’s electoral prospects. 

The need for a prospective leader of the party and opposition to be properly “road tested” is obvious. While it is premature at this stage for both Borg and Delia to be stress-tested in government, a proper scrutiny of their views, skeletons in the closet and, crucially, vision for the party and country is a prerequisite for judging whether they are up to the job. 

Previous PN leadership election campaigns focused on relatively small differences over strategy and personality. This leadership campaign, however, will likely be dominated by a debate over the original understanding that might have been struck between Borg and Delia and what, when, why, and how something went wrong. Different interpretations will be flying around why no contender from the ultra-conservative camp came forward to express an interest in contesting. 

Will they differ over what a PN without a serious prospect of governing should be for: winning power through electoral politics or building a movement? Will they let doctrinal purism stand in the way of their avowed aim of electoral advancement? Add to this a possible division over ideology, and you have a recipe for the most dramatic leadership election in the PN’s history. 

Political parties are funded, to a varying degree, by membership dues. Members also play a pivotal role in managing the grassroots, local mobilisation and getting out the vote at elections. The ordinary members who pay subscriptions to and campaign for the party should, in exchange, have a say over its policies, its candidates and, above everything else, its leader. 

Without this influence, they have little incentive to stay in the party, yet their efforts are vital for it to remain operational and a campaigning force. From this perspective, it is right that members choose their leader, and the latter should implement policies that reflect the members’ preferences. 

The possibility of the PN winning an election might increase not only in the eventual elected leader’s charisma but also in party unity and coherence and in the factions’ total contributions to party work and electoral efforts. 

By charisma, I mean authority. When the person’s charisma’s first purpose is to have followers abide by their leadership, as Baroness Thatcher and General De Gaulle had historically managed to do in the UK and France. 

The stakes are high as the PN approaches its biggest single moment yet since its calamitous election defeats in the last three general elections.