Is the PN trying to commit collective suicide?

“Hello, 911? This is an emergency call… Huh? No, no, I’m not trying to order a pizza, thank you very much. What do you mean, ‘am I sure’? Of course I’m sure. And no, I don’t care if you have a special offer on double pepperoni. This is an emergency, I tell you. An attempted suicide. And not just by one individual: an entire political party is standing on the ledge of a tall building in Pieta’, threatening to jump off at any minute…

“What? Oh. I see. You don’t consider that to be an emergency, do you? Happens all the time, does it? Ah well. In that case I think I’ll order that pizza after all. No pepperoni, but lots of green peppers. Cheers…”

OK, it was the prank emergency call that no one has ever made. Yet the emergency it describes is very real. It is as though something, somewhere in the thought processes of the party currently in Opposition, has suddenly snapped. One second they’re all talking about the need for a new beginning, a new direction, to reach out to the electorate, to rebuild bridges and to raise the Titanic: next, they make announcements and take decisions that open themselves up to howls of criticism and a barrage of derision… mostly from the very people whose support they should be trying to win back.

All sense of political strategy has evidently been flung out of the window, and the party seems to be considering throwing itself out next. How else do you explain the fact that the PN is now asking for a state bailout, in a country where approximately 70% (according to a MaltaToday survey – other polls place the percentage even higher) viscerally oppose the concept of state-party financing on principle?

When I first saw the story I thought it was a joke. But there it was, in black on white. Tell you what: let’s read it together, shall we?

This is the headline: “Opposition to propose financial compensation to political parties for discrimination by the state”…

Erm… you could almost stop there really. Already multiple questions arise. Is this the right time for the PN to be asking for financial compensation? Who will foot the bill? And is this ‘compensation’ really intended to counter ‘discrimination by the state’? Or is it just that the PN, after over a decade of astonishing financial mismanagement that has left it saddled with an acknowledged debt of €8 million – note: we don’t know the real debt figures, as they haven’t published their accounts – is now left with no other option but to devise schemes to hive off a little taxpayer’s money here and there?

But let’s carry on. “PN General Secretary Chris Said explained when speaking in Parliament that the Opposition agreed with the Party Funding Bill in principle, but it would continue to insist that the political parties should be on a level playing field and there should be no discrimination…”

Time for another small pause. In a way it’s kind of nice that the PN now wants a level playing field and that ‘there should be no discrimination’. Strange, though, that it only ever sees ‘discrimination’ when this is (very dubiously, for reasons I shall come to in a moment) directed at itself.

Where was this sense of fairness throughout the quarter-century that the PN spent actively resisting calls for a reform of the electoral laws? A reform that was supposed to create a ‘level playing field’ for all political parties… including those not represented in parliament, precisely because the playing field is too steep to permit anyone else in?

This same newfound sense of injustice was certainly nowhere to be seen in the 2008 election, for instance: when a vote difference of just 1,580 between the two main parties translated into five extra seats for the PN – while Alternattiva Demokratika, which polled 3,810 votes, got no seats at all. But again, let’s not digress. There is more:

“At present… the PN was at a significant disadvantage because the Labour Party had benefited handsomely in the past, and was continuing to benefit, from properties passed on to it by Labour governments. These included properties owned by the state or requisitioned from private owners...”

You can see where this is all heading, right? The PN is at ‘a significant disadvantage’, not because of the hopeless financial mess it has created for itself… but because the Labour Party has helped itself to more public (and private) properties than the PN did over the years.

Indirectly, this means that both parties – including the PN – have benefited from a wilful misinterpretation of the law to help themselves to things to which they are not entitled.

They have both requisitioned private properties for their own uses, even though the law very clearly states that private property can only be requisitioned ‘to serve a public purpose’.

And I won’t even go into the question of whether the compensation paid out to the owners was ever ‘adequate’, as the law also stipulates.

So yes, make no mistake. There is an injustice staring us all in the face here. And it’s been going on decades. But never fear! Chris Said has a cunning plan that will right all wrongs, redress all injustices, and restore balance to the Cosmos.

Let me guess, Dr Said: your solution to this injustice is to simply ensure that the PN gets a nice, fat cheque from the taxpayer… while both parties get to keep the ill-gotten use of those properties, even though the purpose they are currently serving has no public value at all?

It was, of course, a joke question. But incredibly, the answer is ‘yes’.

“In order to counter this imbalance, he said, the Opposition would move an amendment which would require each political party to declare in detail the number of public properties it held and how much rent had been paid during that year…. Once the revenue of each party from public properties was worked out, compensation would be given BY THE STATE [my emphasis] to the other parties in parliament to restore an even playing field.”

Well, what can I say? That’s absolutely terrific, Chris. Sheer genius. Labour rents more public properties than the PN… so the PN, which incidentally can’t afford to pay its €1.9 million water and electricity bills, on top of the rent it owes for its own public properties… now argues that its own inability to make ends meet constitutes an ‘injustice’, which has to be redressed by the taxpayer.

And that’s without even taking the issue of requisitioned property into account. There, the demand becomes not only outrageous but downright surreal: Labour has unfairly requisitioned more private properties over the years than the PN has: so the PN’s idea of rectifying this injustice is to demand financial compensation… FOR ITSELF. To be paid, in part, by the owners of the same properties that were requisitioned…

It is staggering. No other word to describe it. The PN would now like the taxpayer to cough up even more money, payable to the PN, so that it can continue to enjoy reaping the rewards of a decades-old injustice at our expense. Meanwhile, if this insane proposal does go through in the end, not only will the original injustice remain unrectified… but it will actually be perpetuated under the legal aegis of a Party Financing Law.

But this only underscores the truly incomprehensible aspect of this initiative. The proposed amendment will not go through. It can’t: Labour have a nine-seat majority, and will obviously vote against.

So why did the PN even propose it in the first place, if it knew it would lose the vote? Viewed through the lens of party politics, the only possible answer – short of the collective suicide scenario I suggested earlier – is that they genuinely believed they stood to gain something from it in the end.

This is the part I just can’t get at all. Chris Said is not exactly a newcomer to the political scene. He can now be regarded as one of the veterans in the Nationalist camp: which includes people who have been active in politics since the 1980s. They know how the game works better than anyone else in this country. So when an Opposition party proposes things which, it knows from the outset, will not get included in the final law… there is normally an ulterior motive.

The most common such motive is to put the government in the awkward predicament of having to vote against something which is very popular among the electorate. (The PN should know this more than most, seeing as the same strategy was very successfully used against them in the recent debate on civil unions.) This would enable the unsuccessful Opposition party to then turn to the electorate, and say: “See? We tried to get this government to do the right thing, but it just won’t listen. Bear that in mind, when you come to decide which party really has your interests at heart,” etc., etc.

In this case, however… they did the clean opposite. They asked for something that they knew (or must have known – there are statistics to prove it) would be hugely unpopular with the electorate; and which in any case stood absolutely no chance of success anyway… so that the government could simply turn to the electorate and say: “See? The opposition tried to get us to do the wrong thing, but we prefer to place the people’s interests before the financial concerns of an individual party. Think of that before you vote, etc.”

Unsurprisingly, in the chorus of derisory comments that appeared under this news item, not even those who normally chip in to defend the Nationalist Party and to criticise the Labour government… not even they could bring themselves to endorse this demand. Here is one such comment from a medical doctor with an almost daily habit of posting pro-PN comments online:“Let us call a spade a spade. This shameful discrimination is not committed by ‘the state’. It is committed by the governing political party. It is that guilty political party that should be paying the financial compensation – not the innocent taxpayer.”

Ooh, you can almost feel the struggle within. The most in the way of partisan support that can be possibly gleaned from that comment is the association of ‘shameful discrimination’ with the Labour government… quite rightly, because it is shameful that the Labour Party continues to benefit from properties wrested unfairly from their owners. BUT… the thrust of the subtle criticism remains directed at the PN. Translated on Google’s newly launched ‘emotional translator’ app, it reads: “Huh? How the heck does the taxpayer even come into this? Why should we pay the Nationalist Party compensation, when the compensation is actually due to us?” And so on and so forth.

So where, exactly, is the brilliant strategic thinking in any of this? Nowhere that I can see. It is the equivalent of handing your opponent a trump card under the table, while simultaneously removing all the aces from your own hand. And under those circumstances, it is safe to assume that the game has already been lost.