After the tsunami… what next for the PN?

Defeat will always be a bitter pill to swallow - even a defeat as roundly predicted as the one experienced by Lawrence Gonzi in this election.

But as someone who has so often criticized Gonzi when he was prime minister, I must concede that he handled his own discomfiture with remarkable grace and dignity, given the sheer scale of the National Party's loss.

In fact you could almost say that Gonzi gave a textbook demonstration of precisely how to behave under such lugubrious circumstances. Not only did he say and do all the right things when the time came... but he also conceded defeat within a record half-hour from the start of the count: thus sparing the country much unnecessary tension, of the kind created by some of his own most ardent supporters just a few hours earlier.

All things told, then, I find myself in full agreement with the general consensus that Lawrence Gonzi bows out of the scene with his head held high and his honour intact (though we will probably disagree wildly about how history will judge his 10-year stint as Prime Minister).

Nonetheless, when he steps down as party leader ahead of a general council meeting to be held some time around June, Lawrence Gonzi will bequeath to his successor a party that is fractured, bruised, humiliated and woefully diminished.

As such, the first task to face its new leader will be (as former tourism minister Mario de Marco wrote in a rather revealing Times article yesterday) to "rebuild the party from scratch".

This reconstruction project may or may not include building bridges to some of the PN's disgruntled former MPs (I for one don't even think it possible to reach out to them all); and perhaps more importantly, to the disenfranchised support bases of those MPs... whose loss was partly responsible for a noticeable drop in turn-out in all the traditional Nationalist strongholds.

At the same time, the new leader will also have to recalibrate the party's general direction and identity in such a way as to make the PN attractive to those voter segments whose support it has clearly lost.

Above all, it needs to regain the shattered trust of the electorate, following a steady decline in confidence that has been picked up in every poll since the 2008 election.

Even just one of those tasks would be considered Herculean by any standard. So to successfully perform all three, and also overturn a 37,000 voter deficit in time to have at least a fighting chance of re-election in 2018... most would argue that it borders on the impossible.

And yet similar reversals of fortunes happen all the time, in Malta and elsewhere. The Labour Party won the 1996 election by a margin of 13,000 votes (a landslide, by the standards of the day)... yet it went on to spectacularly lose that same margin less than two years later.

Likewise, Labour would unexpectedly lose the 2008 election, yet go on transform a 1,000-vote deficit into an unprecedented 37,000-vote majority in just five years.

So can the PN pull it off? The answer depends on whether the new leadership takes on board the lessons learnt from this election: not just from the campaign itself, but more specifically from the mistakes made by this government since 2003.

Decisions, decisions

If it happens at all, the PN's transformation will have to begin with a change in leadership over the next three months. Naturally it is far too early to make reliable predictions... though at a glance it seems there are already a few possible contenders jockeying for position.

One thing is however certain, regardless who actually inherits the baton from Gonzi in the end.

The first task he or she will face will be to unify the party: all other considerations (including rebranding, etc) must perforce be considered secondary.

For this reason alone, the choice of new PN leader will have to fall on a reconciliatory figure: ideally, someone unassociated with any of the 'factions' that enjoyed dominance in the Gonzi administration.

At the risk of sounding unkind, I would a priori exclude any who took centre-stage in the last election campaign... including Simon Busuttil, whose ascent to the top job looked unstoppable until a few months ago (but looks rather different now, for reasons which are too complex to outline here).

Other factions which may have suffered through association with Gonzi include the confessional wing which first rose to prominence in 2004.

I won't mention names, but we all have clear memories of the many 'crusades' that aroused the natural suspicion of a small sliver of liberals who until recently had always voted Nationalists.

Basically, anyone associated with such baldly dogmatic and inflexible initiatives as the Constitutional abortion amendment drive, or the sharp spike in censorship cases (that, let's face it, seemed to coincide with Gonzi's term as PM)... and even more so, the lobby within the PN that had vociferously campaigned against divorce in the 2011 referendum...these are all 'guilty by association' of at least one of many the factors that led to last weekend's humungous electoral defeat.

This is not to say that all such persons will simply be precluded from participation in a future Nationalist shadow Cabinet... if so, it would merely be a case of migrating over to the opposite extreme.

Besides, at the end of the day, the new leader will be chosen by party delegates who are not omniscient and certainly not infallible... so they may easily make the mistake of choosing someone who represents continuity from the failed policies of yesteryear, rather than a 'change' which the election result itself appears to recommend.

But my guess is that the party will be looking for a leader whose appeal extends far, far beyond the limited circles of 'traditionalist conservatives' who (when all is said and done) are not really representative of the broader spectrum of actual or potential Nationalist voters.

Of course I stand to be corrected on this point (being not exactly omniscient or infallible myself)... but if I owned such a thing as a 'hat', I would not hesitate to eat it if the next PN leader turns out to be someone who voted anything but 'yes' to divorce in both referendum and subsequent parliamentary vote.

This is not to say that there will be no appointments for any of the others. On the contrary, the new leader will have to be mindful not to exclude any faction at all from appointment to positions of trust within party structures.

Indeed, if the new leader is elected from the PN's so-called 'liberal' wing - as I strongly suspect will be the case - he or she would be wise to learn from the mistakes made by Gonzi upon his own election in 2004.

At the time, Gonzi's appointments seemed tailor-made to exclude all those who did not fall within his own preferred model of 'Nationalist identity'...and more damning still, he made the mistake of ostracising his erstwhile leadership rivals (unlike his own predecessor Fenech Adami, who took care to accommodate Guido de Marco after the latter unsuccessfully ran against him in 1977).

The price Gonzi would pay for this mistake would be disproportionately high, and for this reason alone I would be very surprised if his successor repeats it so soon after a resounding defeat.

My guess is that the unsuccessful runner-up will be embraced within the party and given prominence, either as deputy leader or through some other appointment: for instance, a liberal/conservative tandem such as (and I stress this is merely a hunch of mine) Mario de Marco as leader, with either Beppe Fenech Adami or Simon Busuttil as deputy.

Other variations may include Chris Said instead of De Marco... and let us not exclude the possibility of a total outsider: I have heard the name of Dr Anne Fenech mentioned... and while it may be a long shot, that is precisely the kind of 'outside-the-box' thinking that the PN should seriously consider.

Having filled those positions, the next consideration will have to be the need to shift the perspective of ordinary Nationalists: from one of extreme pessimism to at least a degree of mild enthusiasm ('optimism', at this stage, may be too much to expect).

Here the prospects immediately look much healthier for the PN. The appointment of a new leader will always generate some excitement at grassroots level; so whether the party will be able to ride the wave of this enthusiasm will really depend not only on who this leader is - i.e., his or her leadership skills, charisma, oratory skills, and all the rest of the tricks of the trade... but also what this new leader will actually do to change the image of the party.

Paradoxically, the incoming PN leader may wish to take a leaf out of Joseph Muscat's book (and why not? It did after all prove to be a best-seller in the end), and consider what the newly appointed Labour leader did when faced with much the same problems (on an admittedly much smaller scale) after his own election bid.

When Muscat was elected Labour leader in 2008, it was likewise in the wake of a gruelling defeat. The numbers themselves may not be comparable... but in most other details, comparisons can and should be made.

Like Gonzi (albeit for different reasons), Alfred Sant had likewise proved divisive as Labour leader. His clash with Mintoff may have been more epochal than Gonzi's clashes with either Franco Debono or Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando; but its effect was likewise to alienate a segment of the Labour electorate and lose the next three elections on the trot.

Nor was this the only problem. Muscat's own election was acrimonious, and frontrunners like Marie Louise Coleiro and Evarist Bartolo initially threatened to pull out of the party altogether.

Muscat was wise to somehow keep these and other disgruntled colleagues on board. He also embarked on a total makeover, having correctly identified the party's poor image among younger voters to be a serious handicap.

I won't spell out the similar makeover that the PN is simply crying out for after its humiliation last Saturday. Let's just say that the party desperately needs to ditch the element of classist elitism that had engulfed it in recent years; to distance itself from hate-speech; to tone down the boastful allusions to the Pn's intrinsic 'superiority' in all things; to modernize its structures and imagery (for instance, Prof. Joe Friggieri once advised Gonzi to drop the 'religio et patria' slogan... but his advice fell on deaf ears).

If it were my job to oversee this transformation, I would even consider changing the party's name - 'Nationalist' being a word which has  decidedly ugly connotations on the European political stage.

Whether the new broom will sweep even the old Fascist-inspired coat of arms out with the rest of the trash is of course not for me to say. But such was the extent of Saturday's drubbing that it is precisely the sort of extreme decision the PN will want to consider taking, if it is to bounce back from that defeat.