Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1137604
25 OPINION devoured whole in a feeding frenzy). And these are the people who intend to take over the Nationalist Party, and turn it (according to their own slogan) into an 'election win- ning machine once more'. Sorry to be blunt, but you have to first learn how to actually win elections before doing that. And 'winning elections' is something these people are manifestly not very good at… to put it mildly. Still, the thing I really don't get at all is: how did they even manage to make such a godawful strategic mistake in the first place? How did they so spectacularly forget all the brutal lessons from their own party's very recent history? Because all this has happened before. Let's rewind to the 2017 election – i.e., the start- ing point of all this turmoil. Then as now, we had (roughly) the same faction approach- ing certain defeat under the bizarre impression that they were about to win – or, at least, come close to winning. I am reliably informed, from numerous PN insiders (and I can name at least two: Mario de Marco and Dione Borg, who both said so publicly when I interviewed them) that Simon Busuttil and his entourage actually based that conviction, in part, on the size and atmosphere of the PN's last-few pre-election mass meetings on the Fosos. Ah, but how many people does it take to fill the Fosos? Once again, not more than 20,000 (but let's be generous, and pretend it's 30,000)…. out of an electorate composed of almost 300,000 voters. And sure, the resulting 10% might be the tip of a much larger iceberg. After all, over 100,000 ended up voting for the PN in 2017. But… since when does a random sample of just 10% translate into 'cer- tainty of victory' in an upcom- ing election? By now you will surely have realised that the mass-meeting delusion is entirely analogous to the Facebook 'wishing well' effect. Both are clear-cut cases of being trapped inside a bub- ble that is destined to burst upon collision with reality. And lo and behold: the same delusion unfolded all over the social media, too. It wasn't just Simon Busuttil and co. who were convinced that victory was 'guaranteed'. All the armies of militant pro-PN keyboard warriors all clearly felt the same way. I had a Facebook discussion with one of these deluded people (no names mentioned, because he is a non-public fig- ure) just a few days before the election itself… and it ended with him crooning trium- phantly: 'Vox Populi, Vox Dei!' Another, slightly more public figure – one of the 'Occupy Justice' brigade – put up a post trying to discredit five (5) independent media polls/ surveys, no less… all of which (unsurprisingly) pointed to- wards an imminent, crushing victory for Labour. The post itself seems to have since been taken down, so this is a paraphrase from memory: 'I don't trust any of those polls. They don't chime in with my own pre-conceived notions. So I say… this is going down to the wire'. Well, we all saw how close to the wire it went in the end. And as you can imagine, both those indefatigable key- board warriors went ve-e-e- ery quiet just a few days later. Now, it looks like the same people have once again set themselves up for the same sort of fall. And this shouldn't really surprise us, because… OK, I'll keep the conclu- sion short, sweet and simple. Because you can't realistically expect to win an election – or a vote of confidence, or any- thing at all, for that matter – if you're not even living in the real world. maltatoday | SUNDAY • 30 JUNE 2019 If a Facebook post somehow chimes in with the viewer's own private opinion or bias… it becomes an instant, incontrovertible 'fact'