This is not the PN we once knew

For Nationalist supporters in general, the past few months will surely be reminiscent of some sort of waking nightmare.

Few can deny that the Nationalist Party we once knew - and also respected for a serious institution, regardless of political affiliation - has practically crumbled to dust before our very eyes. The tendency among die-hard supporters so far has been to blame the so-called 'rebel MPs' for this state of affairs. But while some of the rebels have indeed taken their individual bravado one step too far, the stark truth of the matter is that the sheer extent of the mayhem now reigning in the PN is now simply too much to be attributed to any one or even three MPs.

Furthermore, it would be altogether too simplistic to point fingers at such obvious scapegoats, whilst all along ignoring the litany of mistakes made over the past few years by the highest levels of the party's administration.

Indeed, when one takes a step back and examines the picture from a broader perspective, the antics of the three MPs almost pale into insignificance, compared to the incredible actions taken by the party itself. Internal problems have after all been manifest within the PN for far longer than the past few months alone. In fact there has been a demonstrable culture of intolerance, emanating from the highest levels of the party, whereby the leadership has time and again simply cut loose - or worse still, tried to destroy - any real or perceived threats to its own unchallenged authority.

A few examples should suffice. When Lawrence Gonzi won what was ultimately an acrimonious 2003 leadership race, he surprised many within the party by failing to afterwards accommodate his defeated rivals in any visible way. Unlike Eddie Fenech Adami - whose main rival Guido de Marco was later elevated to deputy leader, in a clear token of party unity - Gonzi chose to alienate and marginalize his perceived 'rivals' at every turn: at one point even withholding from Dalli the fact that he was under investigation over allegations that later turned out to be fabricated.

And where Fenech Adami had surrounded himself by people representing various shades of party opinion, Gonzi has always made it very clear that no such spectrum of opinions was to flourish under his own tenure of office.

Matters would eventually reach a nadir with the divorce debate - a debate that in many respects crystallized the precise dynamics of the schism now evident within the party. Gonzi's response was to mobilize the entire party executive to take up a position against Pullicino Orlando's private member's bill... without pausing to consider how Nationalist voters might feel about the same issue.

The result was little short of catastrophic for the PN's credibility: within only eight months of adopting a formal anti-divorce platform, the party was forced to beat an undignified retreat with its tail between its legs, after the same position was brutally rejected by the electorate in a referendum that the Prime Minister would go on to ignore - shocking and distressing many Nationalist supporters in the process.

Nor was this the only instance in which the party leader made poor use (or abuse) of the party structures for his own political ends. The farcical transformation of the same executive as a 'judge and jury' to condemn the three MPs - arguably even in yesterday's vote - was similarly a case of the PN serving Gonzi, rather than the other way round.

All this is a direct development of the earlier 'GonziPN' motif that had won the 2008 election against the run of the play. As strategies go it has served its purpose admirably: unfortunately, however, it appears that Gonzi himself made the predictable mistake of starting to really believe that the entire party was in fact an extension of his own persona (as the slogan directly implies).

And nobody - not even Eddie Fenech Adami, whose hold on the PN was infinitely stronger than Gonzi's - had ever made such an extraordinary claim before.

The net result was that the PN was slowly transformed from a broad church representing a panoply of different views, into a party straitjacketed by a highly restricted world vision of a man driven by his own self-preservation at all costs.

As a result, people perceived not to be part of Gonzi's inner sanctum were made to feel increasingly excluded. Apart from failed leadership contenders Dalli and Louis Galea, there were others who bore the brunt of this 'new way of doing politics': former Commissioner Joe Borg, who learnt of his demotion from his wife (who learnt of it from the eight o'clock news); rejected ministers such as Mugliett and Ninu Zammit, who were informed of the loss of their portfolios by means of text messages... at every point, Gonzi's strategy appeared to be the same: to simply prune away those branches that no longer served him any purpose, and discard them without much ado.

The extent of the mess we are seeing today is a direct consequence of the sum total of these and other, myriad failures. Nationalists should spare a thought to these, too, before rushing to pin the blame on every conceivable scapegoat except those with whom the true blame lies.