Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1359157
8 NEWS ANALYSIS maltatoday | WEDNESDAY • 7 APRIL 2021 Saying sorry: a first step or PRESIDENT emeritus Ma- rie-Louise Coleiro Preca's call on Labour to apologise and em- bark on critical soul searching has provoked two opposite re- actions. On one side there were those who derided Coleiro Preca for having been part of Labour and Joseph Muscat's government and who consider Labour un- redeemable. Underlying this school of thought is a Mani- chean view that Labour is histor- ically "not trustworthy" or that it contains within it the seeds of immorality. On the other side there were those who kept in- sisting the party is not to blame for the actions of a few rotten apples, with most shooting down the idea of an apology relegating it to a token gesture of 'humility' from a magnanimous party. A party grandee's plea Surely Coleiro Preca did weigh her words carefully when this newspaper asked her what steps Labour should take in the face of a tsunami of revelations linking the highest echelons of the party to white-collar crime. She did not propose a token apology made in passing, but a soul-searching exercise. To do so she presented the party with a list of questions on its identi- ty. Unlike others in her party who consider recent events as a stain in an otherwise pos- itive transformation of the party under Muscat, she sees a direct link between the moral degeneration under Abela's predeces- sor with the ide- ological drift to neoliberal pol- itics and the party's mes- m e r i s a t i o n with business. She recognised that the degeneration did not occur in a vacuum but in a con- text of a loss of values and ideals. Abolishing Labour Among the most critical of Coleiro Preca's words was blog- ger Manuel Delia, who does not mince his words in advocat- ing an all-or-nothing approach, once again refusing to reach out to critical voices in Labour. This is exactly the attitude which crippled the civil society movement born after the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia. Instead of a move- ment which r e a c h e s out to La- bourites to bring about change, it turned into a movement bent on alien- ating anyone remotely associated with the party. And what could alienate Labour activists and vot- ers then calling for the abolition of the Labour Party? For that is what Delia seems to advocate. "But we need the truth. And the truth is that no political par- ty that facilitated criminals to take our country from us should be a political party at all. Saying sorry does not change that. Is Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca pre- pared to imagine a reality without the Labour Party?" Delia asked. The answer to that is that the proposed 'abolition' of the Labour Party not only belongs to the realm of political fiction in a country where party identity is a definer of personal identi- ty, but flies in the face of democra- cy, and it reveals a strain of an- tipathy against Labour which c o n t a m i - nates what An apology from Labour is not enough but it could be a start of a process. JAMES DEBONO analyses the reaction to Marie- Louise Coleiro Preca's call for soul-searching in the party she loves President emeritus Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca