Waiting for the Metsola miracle

Paraphrasing Joe Biden’s latest words, I’m a capitalist too, but my political background and personal history is leftist. My political education involved an excessive amount of Marxist literature and endless amounts of history books.

One of the things you learn reading Lenin is that revolution does not come by itself, but is sparked by the revolutionary party in the appropriate historical conditions. Lenin and the Bolshevists spent years militating and actively working for the revolutionary push before they had their moment. Unlike today’s Russian conscripts, who often take to social media pleading with their governors not send them to war or to complain about their miserable conditions, the Bolshevists used to organise themselves in clandestine military groups and fight back against the Tsarist regime with many of them exiled or in prison.

So, this is how I see Bernard Grech and the Nationalist stalwarts of today. A bunch of Russian conscripts who don’t want to fight a war, videoing themselves in a message to Roberta Metsola, pleading with her to come down from Brussels to save them.

Please, Roberta, don’t send us to war alone against an authoritarian government that has captured all state institutions, we are demoralised, and our party is broke. We have no guts and money left. Please, help us Roberta.

Pathetic.

I am of course also hopeful like many that Roberta Metsola will eventually come back to Malta to lead the Opposition against Labour, but I’m neither betting my salvation on Roberta Metsola. The Nationalist Party is doing a very grave mistake of creating a mindset where all is lost unless Roberta Metsola comes to save it. That’s not how the Nationalist Party should be riled up and it’s leadership is decapitating itself the process by showing such weakness.

The fight against the Labour government should be organised, thoughtful and persistent and PN should not hope that one single person will save us from our predicament. Once again, I will also reiterate that the probability is that Roberta Metsola will be nominated for the Parliament’s Presidency once again given that the priority is to ensure leadership continuity so as not to signal any weakness or divisions in Europe during this time of war. The Nationalist Party has to come to terms with the fact that it may very well spend another five years with a leader who is not Roberta Metsola.

And why not? There is plenty of work to do in politics before a superstar leader takes the stage, and there is plenty of hope to tap considering the ever increasing number of people who are dissatisfied with the government. Labour can be defeated without a Metsola, even though it would be slightly more difficult. However, the Nationalist Party must learn to reconcile, as Joseph Muscat did, the conservative wings of the party with its liberal group and prioritises its liberal wing on civil liberties, otherwise, PN will remain the fossil of old-times past. By now, having failed to rile up considerable support from the mass over its anti-abortion stance, it should be obvious to PN strategists that they are not going to win any election in the future by remaining stubbornly anti-civil-liberties. The Labour Party has so far used PN’s conservative positions in its favour, yet as abortion is decriminalised in extreme cases, removing for the taboo over abortion in parliament, Labour has run out of controversial civil-liberties that it can use for its political games.

So, while PN waits for a miracle to happen, it can in the meantime work to reorganise its political thinking, address the problems in its finances, revive its local committees, invest in the local clubs to increase their activity and build an effective party which can mount a challenge to the LAbour Party. There are various decent individuals in PN who can take on such a task and I am very happy to put my hopes with Mark Anthony Sammut (the engineer), as someone who can modernise and revitalise PN. It’s also about time that in politics we start having politicians who actually know about the topics they are talking about, in contrast to a Super One propagandists who are wrecking public finances by making horrible trades and deals in our name.

The choice is logical and obvious. Who would you trust more with our energy infrastructure and supplies, a Super One lackey who refuses to answer questions, wastes public finances by doing bad trades, and covers up for corruption, or an engineer who actually knows what he is talking about?

The future is bright without Labour.