PN’s ‘universalism’ is not everybody’s reality, Farrugia’s message to party

Nationalist MP Jean-Pierre Farrugia yesterday said the government ministers who had been at the forefront of Malta’s economic expansion were “the least to have understood that this development also made us more secular.”

He was probably referring Austin Gatt and what he represented for the PN: promoting liberal economics at breakneck speed but conservative in social values, the kind of marriage of ideas that had now divorced the PN from reality.

Many were those who like Farrugia recognised that the PN was “at a crossroads” in 2011 – people like MEP Simon Busuttil, MP Karl Gouder, or former candidate Prof. Joe Friggieri – who in 2-minute interventions had to condense the message that the PN’s confessional elements had to get to terms with its liberal electorate.

He also hinted that the PN’s grip on society was now overstepping its limits into areas where citizens were free to decide for themselves. Quoting Jurgen Ruttgers, he said the PN did not have to withdraw itself politically, but redefine the areas in which thecitizen and the state are responsible: “for politicians and parties it will mean less politics, for citizens more democracy and more participation”.

It was telling that Farrugia, the doctor who proposed a sane IVF vision for the government, told Lawrence Gonzi – already battling with pangs of conscience about embryo freezing – that the party’s “universalism” could not cater for the realities of those “living from hand to mouth”.

If this was Farrugia’s reference to Gonzi’s confessionalism, he was harsh about it: “[Jurgen] Ruttgers wrote that ‘it is necessary to abandon the fiction that we can do everything’… we think this universalism that has taken over our social vision is politically convenient. But as I have been saying, it’s the main reason why we’re no longer the Christian politicians who relate to those living from hand to mouth.”

Farrugia said this was the “divorce” the PN had to focus upon: the economic recession that people thought was virtual, but which had alienated the party from those falling behind. He then said that this crisis was now pushing Labour to a “calculated and strategic risk to move to the right”, but he failed to elaborate whether he was referring to Labour’s talk of tax cuts and immigration controls.

Farrugia even said the 2008 electoral slogan GonziPN mischaracterised Lawrence Gonzi as a demagogue, leaving him to “shoulder the insensitivity of the salary raises Cabinet awarded itself.”

In a reference to Opposition leader Joseph Muscat’s proposal to tax industrial polluters, Farrugia said the hiked energy bills that have dented the PN’s popularity were carbon taxes.

“Let our rivals bask in a leader bent solely on taking power, who is ready to ride the wave of anti-immigrant prejudice,” Farrugia said.

Farrugia had been a staunch critic of the salary raises for Cabinet ministers and said that MPs should remain “assiduous” in their auto-criticism. “My auto-criticism was certainly not anti-political (‘kwalunkwista’).”

Farrugia also echoed other speakers’ desires to see new faces in the PN, calling for personnel recruitment and a programme of political formation.

But here he made another inroad into Lawrence Gonzi’s conflict on voting in favour f the divorce bill he tried to slay by taking it to a referendum. “It is natural that conflicts are resolved by the will of the majority, much as popular parties want to prove that common interests are greater than individual ones… it’s this democratic style of ours that we must teach by our actions.”