[WATCH] ‘Regeneration key to PL’s election victory’

The Labour Party’s ability to regenerate itself after the serious internal problems that hit it in 2019 helped decide the election, academic Mario Thomas Vassallo said.

Conversely, the Nationalist Party’s failure to regenerate sealed its fate, he added during a post mortem of Saturday’s election result on TVM News Plus’s Xtra.

“This legislature experienced serious turmoil with the infamous murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia that led to an earthquake inside the PL. But the party was able to emerge from these internal problems and regenerate itself, something the PN failed to do,” Vassallo said.

He was critical of the PL’s apparent lack of due diligence on prospective candidates that allowed Rosianne Cutajar to contest despite having breached ethics and called the decision to send tax rebate cheques on election eve a Machiavellian move to get the vote out.

But Vassallo said the Robert Abela administration had started tackling the issues that caused the country to suffer during the Muscat years, almost making people forget what had happened.

“The election was decided by the way the political parties solved or did not solve their internal problems,” he emphasised.

Vassallo said PN exponents had been right in opposing the bad governance that occurred in the Muscat administration but ended up “playing a game of double standards”.

“The Blue Heroes faction did not want to accept the democratic choice of PN members when they chose Adrian Delia as leader... they ended up playing a game of double standards by showing a lack of good governance when they ignored the democratic choice of the party’s members,” Vassallo said.

Randolph Debattista, editor of Labour Party online organ The Journal, said the party’s biggest asset is its capability to continuously change itself.

“Within the PL once a leader is installed everyone gets behind them and pulls the same rope. In the PN, once a leader is installed he has to fit in a structure that is bigger than himself. This is leading to whoever is elected leader in the PN being stifled,” Debattista said. 

In a short comment, PN secretary-general Michael Piccinino said the PN was disappointed but it now had to understand why people decided to give up on the political class and the PN in particular. Piccinino said there was not one reason for defeat.

Piccinino refrained from passing judgement on Bernard Grech’s decision to contest the party leadership race, insisting it was his duty to ensure all statutory rules are observed.