It was a foregone conclusion

I am writing before people cast their vote on Saturday. But I know, as much as almost everybody does, that the result is a foregone conclusion. The only question mark is the size of Joseph Muscat's victory: whether Lawrence Gonzi's defeat would be manageable or humiliating.

I think that there are four reasons for Labour's victory: Lawrence Gonzi's credibility problem, the PN's underestimation of Joseph Muscat and his campaign; the lack of vision in the PN's campaign and the fact that the PN lost the moral high ground.

In an article in this newspaper ('In a state of denial') in April last year, I had pointed out that Lawrence Gonzi's most vulnerable trait was his lack of credibility. In my words: "Gonzi has sacrificed his credibility too many times as his wheeler-dealing methods have led him to demote it to a level practically at the very bottom of his priority list. Witness how he has made a parody of our parliamentary democracy with the House of Representatives meeting without taking a vote for so long and then to follow this extraordinary situation by an abnormally long Easter recess. This might have been necessary for the survival of the current administration but it has strengthened the perception that this survival comes before all else, even before the interests of the country - the exact opposite of what he claims."

I also went on pointing out:

"Moreover, the number of announced projects that never materialised (such as the White Rocks sports tourism complex) or that have not materialised in the magnificent way that was promised (such as the Smart City project) have also eroded Gonzi's credibility.

"What is even foreboding is the way the PN and its leadership are moving ahead, selling the idea of the 'impressive successes' that this administration has managed to garner in the last four years, as if the PN is not facing its greatest crisis in the last half century.

Gonzi speaks as if there is no problem with his credibility and as if he has concentrated all his efforts at raising the employment figures, an issue that he pops up every time he is faced with a difficult question that he tries to avoid answering."

During the last eleven months, this incredibly unsustainable situation was allowed to get worse. To the extent that the day after Lawrence Gonzi promised that this time round, the attitude of his government to the common citizen will be more 'humane', Simon Busuttil had to step in to say that he would 'guarantee' that a new PN government would not repeat the same old mistakes. Busuttil himself must have felt that without this 'guarantee' nobody would believe Lawrence Gonzi's promises. Otherwise why say this at all?

There is no doubt that the PN bigwigs seriously underestimated Joseph Muscat and were taken aback by the professionalism and marketing savvy of Labour's electoral campaign. Remember Austin Gatt bragging that the PN will remain in power for another 20 years? That was no empty boasting. Supporting that boast was the belief that Labour was still the old adversary, with the stupid shortcomings that were evident under Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici and Alfred Sant. The PN ignored the fact that Joseph Muscat had the advantage of being the new kid on the block and, as has always happened in the perennial PN vs. Labour tug-of-war, the party with a new leader who is an untried and unknown quantity tends to win the election.

Muscat's launching of the campaign on 7 January exactly on the stroke of midnight was a gimmick, but his campaign slogan: 'Malta Taghna Lkoll' was not. In spite of the PN propaganda machinery considering it an ephemeral meaningless cliché, it did strike a chord among many and the PN had no equally strong emotional vision to compete with it. Muscat was considered by the PN as lightweight and superficial, which to some extent he is. But he unexpectedly made up for this deficiency in the best of manners. The launch of Labour's energy proposal was met by derision by the PN without their having assessed it properly because underlying the 'forma mentis' of the PN bigwigs, Labour were inevitably amateurish and incompetent. This bias - the result of the way Labour used to behave in the past - has proved to be the PN's undoing. Instead of studying Labour's energy proposal with the seriousness it deserved and picked upon its defects - for defects it certainly has - the PN went on a rampage, exhibiting a crass and dangerous superiority attitude, as if the PN was simply saying that if it comes from Labour, it must certainly be inept. When the PN realised that Labour's energy plan is far from stupid, and started to find some serious objections to it, it was too late.

This haughty, we-know-it-all, attitude towards whatever Muscat was saying could not be sustained over the nine-week electoral campaign. Muscat's proposals were described as unattainable or even regurgitated ideas from the PN's immense stash of bright ideas. In the end the PN's criticism of Labour's proposals fell flat, not because they were something out of the world but because the PN's attitude towards them was a reflection of the prejudice leading them to believe that Labour is gawky and has not changed in a quarter of a century... as it can never change.

The PN's campaign based on the successes of the incumbent administration was visionless. It merely said 'more of the same' at a time when in the popular mind 'the same' recalled Lawrence Gonzi's debacles and u-turns more than his successes. Labour's vague 'promise' of a new direction in the way of doing things led the PN to defend 'the same'. Simon Busuttil, touted as the agent of change within the PN, ended the campaign emphasising that Malta does not need a new direction. What Malta does need is a government with a new attitude, more than a new direction, but if the PN were to spell this out it would mean that it is accepting that the attitude of Lawrence Gonzi's administration towards the citizen was intrinsically flawed, as indeed it was.

In these circumstances, the PN's call for the country to build on its successes in the economic and employment sectors did not cater for the breath of fresh air that the country was yearning for. The PN did not manage to project a vision that the country could look forward to, a vision that struck an emotional chord that raises one's spirits and makes the future something to look forward to. Muscat's 'Malta taghna lkoll' could eventually prove to be mostly empty rhetoric just as both Barack Obama's 'Yes we can' and Lawrence Gonzi's 'Together everything is possible' in 1988 eventually did, but the PN had no adequate response to it.

Last, but not least, the PN was perceived as having lost the moral high ground. Not because some Minister was corrupt but because a network of corruption and shady deals thrived during the PN's tenure of office. Like many, I do not doubt Lawrence Gonzi's personal integrity, but this does not preclude people from judging his performance as one leading to a situation where this network blossomed under his very nose.

The negative part of the PN electoral campaign did not help matters. This included character assassinations based on barefaced lies about adversaries and the blowing up of small incidents so that serious but dishonest accusations could be made against particular persons. This not only lowered the level of the debate, but led to the PN losing its moral leadership with the ordinary citizen perceiving no ethical differences between Labour and PN. Choosing one instead of the other for moral and ethical grounds was no longer a consideration.

Sitting back and simply reporting to the police when allegations are made without taking any visible positive action to see and correct what went wrong together with an abject penchant to let problems fester rather than nipping them in the bud fatally harmed Gonzi's administration.

When the story of Lawrence Gonzi's 2018-13 administration is written, many will wonder how and why in 2013 Lawrence Gonzi became the PN's worst liability when five years previously he was the PN's greatest asset.

The answer to this lies not in the scrutiny of his intentions that were undoubtedly genuine or in the unrelenting hard work he put in his job, but in his lack of leadership qualities.