Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1151507
25 OPINION happened had he lost. Delia's victory therefore means that the 68% who voted for him, did so just because he is their party leader, and not for any other reason. It certainly can't be because of anything Delia said he's going to do… because let's face it: he hasn't said a word, beyond meaningless catchphrases such as 'we will reach out to the electorate', etc., etc. It is as though the leader- ship cult entrenched by that 'GonziPN' slogan has been extended to Adrian Delia… though Gonzi had the backing of 96% of his party (and still lost in 2013), while Delia has little more than two-thirds that amount of internal support. Erm… sorry to repeat the question, but… who needs hindsight to predict the out- come there? It's as visible as those sixteen tower-cranes I can see from my window right now… And it is visible everywhere else you look, too. We can now see the beginnings of the (likewise predictable) 'one- party state' situation we find ourselves in: with ministers still pointing towards Labour's twin electoral victories in 2013 and 2017, to justify projects that were actually in neither of those manifestos. Well, Ian Borg knows as much as I do that it was the 'cult of Joseph Muscat' (cou- pled with the spontaneous combustion of the PN) that engineered those victories; so he also knows that the same leadership cult will be enough to steer that project through… possibly even increasing La- bour's majority in the process. Yet, as Gonzi discovered to his cost in 2011, 'leadership cults' have their limitations. No matter how popular, politicians can still piss off certain sections of their own party's support base enough to gnaw at their own electoral foundations. So, in the case of the Central Link project, the equation becomes: how many environmentalist voters can Labour afford to lose, without denting its majority enough to actually pose a threat? In the past, the only thing keeping the brakes on this sort of situation was the exist- ence of a two-party system that – although unevenly balanced, at times – provided a reasonable opposition for disgruntled voters to turn to. It might sound like a fairy tale now, but… once upon a time. there was a real price to pay for overstepping the frontiers of your political authority. The resulting fall-out could conceivably cost you your grip on government. Well, that is precisely what is missing from the equation now. And all because of an astonishing lack of foresight, across the board… maltatoday | SUNDAY • 4 AUGUST 2019 Gonzi's mistake was not only that he failed to predict the outcome of the referendum; it was also that he failed to notice that most of the 'Yes' campaigners actually constituted a signif icant slice of his own party's voter-base Then Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi, with his wife Kate, casting his vote in the divorce referendum