Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1013924
24 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 12 AUGUST 2018 OPINION 'IF you can't beat them, shame them'. No, they're not my words; and I'm not re- peating them because I share the sentiment, either. In case you're wondering: that is actually the headline of an article penned this week by Karol Aquilina: Nationalist MP, and Opposition spokes- man for 'Reforms, Citizen- ship and Simplification'. To be fair, at least he's taking the last part of his shadow portfolio seriously. Hard to imagine a lazier oversimplification than that in any context, really. It's the equivalent of a typical classroom dimwit reason- ing to himself that: 'if I can't get better grades than all the clever kids... I'll just call them names instead...' Well, no prizes for guess- ing what sort of grade a child like that would receive at the end of the scholastic year. Mrs Baldacchino, who was my head teacher in Year Six, would probably have described it as: "a big... fat... ZERO" (note: believe it or not, the entire class – myself included – thought that was incredibly witty at the time; in fact, we all shouted out the 'ZERO' part in chorus). After all, it doesn't take very much intelligence to 'shame' others. It does, however, require something called 'a brain' to study for, and pass, an exam. There is no reason under the sun why it should work out any different for a po- litical party. Replace 'exams' with 'elections', and 'grades' with 'electoral results', and... well, there you have it. No difference at all. With that one headline, Karol Aquilina has very helpfully pinpointed exactly why the Nationalist Party has not passed a single electoral test since 2008... and even then, it barely scraped through by the skin of its teeth. Not only that, but Aqui- lina's article also explains why the PN's 'results' have just kept worsening and worsening, finally reaching the sorry state it languishes in today: with various polls suggesting it will lose its next electoral appointments by anywhere up to 100,000 votes. Paradoxically, however, the very person who so squarely put his finger on the crux of the matter, seems incapable of making that connection himself. Karol Aquilina didn't write those words as an acknowledgement of the unmitigated failure of the Nationalist Party's entire strategy since (circa) 2008. There was no 'mea culpa' – still less 'nostra culpa' – anywhere to be discerned in the article itself. On the con- trary, his entire argument is rooted in the 'firm belief that the Nationalist way of doing politics was the right way.' All of which raises the inevitable question: if the PN's was all along really the 'right way' of doing politics... why have the results to date been so consistently abysmal for the PN? Why has the Nationalist tactic of 'sham- ing the adversary' only ever served to strengthen that ad- versary – to the point that it now threatens to command a staggering two-thirds majority in parliament after the next election – while si- multaneously truncating the same PN into two interne- cine and utterly irreconcil- able factions? Seeing as a connection with 'schools' and 'exams' has already been made: let us treat that as an examination question, and see what sort of grade we'd all get. For an average pass-mark – let's say, a 'C-' – all a student would really have to do is point out the basic flaw in the premise. "Because it isn't 'the right way of doing poli- tics' – Duh!" That, alone, would be enough to inform the exam- iner that our fictitious stu- dent possesses enough grey matter to at least understand the root cause of the prob- lem, thereby earning an entry-level pass-mark. But it would be nowhere near enough to get an 'A'. For that, you'd have to also spell out, in painstaking detail, WHY the Nationalist Party's strategy was all along so evidently doomed to fail. Interestingly enough, Karol Aquilina himself comes close to what might have been a straight-'A'... if only he didn't correctly join all the dots, and yet somehow still manage to draw all the wrong conclusions. This is an excerpt from said article (remember: under the headline, 'if you can't beat them, shame them'): "Historically the National- ist Party has always been a broad-church of ideas, inter- ests and personalities. Nev- ertheless, the PN has always managed to find common ground on which to garner support from its traditional base and society in general: the gaining of Independence, freedom and democracy, membership of the European Union, the adoption of the Euro and more recently the fight against corruption..." Closing an eye at that last (preposterous) observation – the PN could not claim the 'fight against corrup- tion' as its own in 2013, after its government collapsed immediately following a cor- ruption scandal... still less today, when it is embroiled in multiple counts of fraud and perjury – it can be seen that Aquilina at least under- stands the causes of the PN's hegemony between 1987 and (roughly) 2004. What's miss- ing from his analysis is an explanation for why every- thing went so perfectly pear- shaped since then. So it falls to us to fill in the blanks. Consider the gravity and consequence of all the PN's battle-cries of yesteryear: Independence... 'Xoghol, Gustizzja, Liberta'... EU ac- cession, and everything that entailed... then compare all that to its chosen battle- cry over the past 10 or so years. There was only ever one to speak of: 'We hate Joseph Muscat'. You could, of course, word the same sentiment in as many ways you like: but you will never get very far from something like: 'Vote for us, because... erm... we're not them.' From the outset that was always doomed to be a self- defeating strategy. For one thing, it forces potential voters to cast their gaze, not on the PN itself... but on Jo- seph Muscat's Labour Party. And once you've made the mistake of directing their gaze in that direction: who's to say they're not going to like what they see? Who's to say they will not look from Muscat's Labour, to the PN under Lawrence Gonzi, Simon Busuttil, Adrian Delia or whoever comes next... Raphael Vassallo Karol Aquilina's entire argument is rooted in the 'f irm belief that the Nationalist way of doing politics was the right way' If you 'shame them'... you can't 'beat