Analysis of a post-mortem…

If ever there was an absolutely foolproof science, it would have to be the science of hindsight.

With hindsight, you can rest assured that everyone will always be 100% correct about everything. Ask any Nationalist today why their party lost the election on 9 March, and you would probably receive a look as though you had just fell to Earth from another planet. Isn't it obvious, they would say? We lost because of this, that and the other...

Yet if you asked the same question just three weeks ago, the same people may well have reacted much like former heavyweight boxing champion George Foreman, when asked if was worried about losing to Muhammad Ali in the 1974 'Rumble in the Jungle': ('Lose'? Did someone say 'LOSE'?!)

But lose they did - both the PN and George Foreman, as it happens - and now, with hindsight, everyone seems to know exactly where it all went pear-shaped for the party formerly known as 'GonziPN'.

More and more Nationalist pundits (and a few outsiders also) now come crawling out of the woodwork, one by one, to tell us what the party should and should not do to overcome this low point in its 120-year history.

Which more or less raises a question: where were all these political analysts hiding during the campaign leading up to that defeat? And why did they keep their reams of good advice to themselves until only after the election... by which time it was manifestly far too late?

The Franco factor

Naturally there are good reasons why these suddenly vocal critics were never heard at any point before the election. Just look at what happened to the very few who did speak up in time to avert the electoral disaster. Branded as 'rebels', dissenting voices within the PN were systematically vilified, humiliated and even hounded out of the party altogether: foremost among them Franco Debono, the MP whose rebellion against Gonzi precipitated so much of the internal dissent that would eventually tear the PN apart.

As long ago as 2010, Debono had singled out the perception of a 'klikka' or 'oligarkija', which had hijacked government for its own ends, as one of the main reasons for the erosion of trust among the electorate.

He also criticised Gonzi for turning the Nationalist Party into an extension of his own ego; and in an impassioned plea for more meritocracy, he singled out former minister Austin Gatt as a person who was doggedly retained through one fiasco after another, while the party bent over backwards to defend his many shortcomings.

A cursory glance at today's public recriminations - even by Nationalists who remained loyal to Gonzi throughout - now suggests that Franco Debono's views are actually widely shared within the party itself.

'De-Gonzification'

Most of the post-electoral guns were immediately turned onto the outgoing strategy group that originally came up with the 2008 electoral slogan, 'GonziPN'. And while direct references to the former Prime Minister himself may have been thin on the ground, many internal critics now consciously or unconsciously agree with Franco Debono that the party's over-reliance on Gonzi to win the previous election had been counter-productive in the long term.

With so many voices now arguing that the party now needs to distance itself from its former leadership, the effect of all this post-election recrimination is almost tantamount to a 'de-Gonzification' of the party.

At times this viewpoint came from surprising sources. Among the heavyweights who called for a totally different approach to the leadership was George Pullicino: the former rural affairs minister who was made a minister in 2003 and retained throughout Gonzi's twin terms of office.

Pullicino was considered one of Gonzi's allies during the internal rift that began with Franco Debono's 'rebellion' in 2010. Yet on his blog he was quick to identify, if not Gonzi himself, at least the centrality of the role of leader as one of the reasons for the defeat.

"We need to identify the identikit of the people who will form part of the team. I emphasise 'team' more than leader... this party cannot be built around one person, but around a team."

Others were considerably more outspoken on this point. Michael Falzon - also a former PN minister under Eddie Fenech Adami - was positively scathing in his assessment of the result. "When the story of Lawrence Gonzi's 2008-13 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," he wrote in an article published before the result was even announced. "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."

Klikka rules OK

Elsewhere, individual party officials such as Clyde Puli (MP) and Pierre Portelli (former president of administrative council) have been heard calling for a revision of the party statute in order to allow all members to elect the leader: as opposed to only the 'councillors', who are perceived to be close to the establishment.

Their pleas fell on deaf ears, and the executive voted against any widening of the electoral pool for the contest which will take place on 4 May.

But the requests in themselves suggest that a faction within the PN is concerned that Gonzi's successor may be hand-picked for all the wrong reasons - and more damningly, that such decisions are all along taken by an unidentified 'party elite' that is actually far removed from the concerns of the man in the street.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this line of argument points towards precisely the same concept of a 'clique' of the kind alluded to so often by Franco Debono. And paradoxically, this selfsame perception has been confirmed by the former Prime Minister's own brother, Michael Gonzi, who practically spelt it out in his own post-mortem of the election result.

"So what really made people give us the boot? The perception of an incompetent government. It was useless doing house visits and pointing all of the above because the perception was of a failing, tired, corrupt group of people who were only interested in statistics and not the basic needs of the family. The continuous perception of a broken internal executive which day in, day out, lead to a complete distrust in the basic core of the management of this country. The perception of a Klikka taking over..."

Michael Gonzi was not the only one to draw this conclusion. Nationalist MPs Robert Arrigo made an almost identical claim in a Facebook update, as did many Nationalist sympathisers on the social networks.

Resigned to defeat

A second major pillar in the broad consensus that appears to be emerging from the wreckage of the PN is that the party needs to move on from a culture of 'untouchables', and towards more transparency and, above all, accountability.

In what was perhaps one of the more perceptive of these electoral 'autopsy' efforts, unsuccessful Nationalist candidate Mark Anthony Sammut argued that the party needs to redefine its understanding of 'loyalty'.

"Loyalty does not mean that we defend the lack of ethics or cover up for mistakes made by people on our side... On the contrary, loyalty ought to mean that, if you place your colleagues and the party in an awkward situation, you step down. You do not force those around you to defend the indefensible..."

No names were mentioned, but the criticism was virtually indistinguishable from the arguments brought forward by the so-called 'rebel' MPs ahead of a vote of no-confidence in then transport minister Austin Gatt, following the Arriva debacle.

Consider how closely Sammut's wording echoes Franco Debono's claims - which were themselves echoed separately by MPs such as Jean-Pierre Farrugia and even Robert Arrigo - that 'others' had consistently been made to pay for Gatt's mistakes throughout Gonzi's second term as PM.

Nor was Gatt the only scapegoat to be publicly 'named and shamed'. Outgoing secretary-general Paul Borg Olivier took his fair share (and arguably a little more) of the blame. Even Simon Busuttil, who authored the rejected manifesto and presented himself as a Deus Ex Machina who could single-handedly 'rescue' the PN - though in the end it seems he didn't make even a dent in the result - came in for some harsh criticism.

There were naturally other reasons cited to account for the historic landslide: mostly variations of the rather abstract theme that the party had grown 'disconnected' with the electorate. But by and large these were mostly offshoots of the same central thesis - i.e., that the Nationalist Party had allowed itself to be taken over by nameless individuals who used the structures of both party and government to further their own ends, as opposed to those of either party or country.

Yet despite the fact that this is now acknowledged by so many people within the Nationalist Party... it appears as thought he same party to gearing up to make all the same mistakes again.

One telltale indication is the announcement that the party has commissioned a report into its own electoral defeat; but that the conclusions of this report shall be kept secret until AFTER the 4 May leadership election.

Considering how, by common consent, the issue of the party leadership was itself central to the election result, it seems remarkable that the party would choose a new leader before coming to terms with why the last one had failed so utterly. It is almost as though a conscious decision has been taken not to learn the lessons from the electoral rout... because those same lessons may disrupt carefully-laid plans that have been in place for the future of the PN since long before the 2013 election.