Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/478858
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 15 MARCH 2015 15 Spring'. In reality, though, the political cli- mate has remained more or less un- changed. Even now, we are gearing up for a local council election, and the messages streaming out of the Nationalist Party these days come across as borderline hysterical accu- sations of corruption everywhere we look. The Café Premier bail-out, the SOCAR agreement… all are present- ed to us as examples of decadence and sleaze, by a party that was itself ousted from office after a corruption scandal of its own. Yet here we have an Opposition member calling for more consensual politics, when his own party seems to be moving very much in the opposite direction. By Grech's own argument, the PN must be severely misreading the signs of the times. Does he agree with that assessment? "Let me tell you my opinion – and I want to be clear that this is my view – I believe that the Opposi- tion has a duty to scrutinise and to point out elements that we believe are not done properly. That is how a modern country has to function. But I feel that, as a party, if we are to make headway we must seize the op- portunity of being in opposition. We must clearly show people that we are appreciating the time in opposition. That we're not bitter about it. Some- times we give the impression that it's everybody's fault but ours. That is a very worrying message, if we were to send it out. Secondly, in Opposi- tion we have a lot of latitude to come up with new policy paradigms. Not just pointing out those areas where government is making a mess. To- day, people are already realising that all the talk we heard about meritoc- racy, transparency has fizzled out. They don't need to have it constantly spelt out to them. Otherwise there's a danger that, yes, we might grow to become a formidable Opposition: but we'll remain in opposition for a very long time." Grech however admits that this vi- sion may be hampered by what he calls 'tribalism'. "Something I feel very strongly about is the need to stamp out tribal politics. The way politics has evolved over time, the kind of tribal environ- ment we have in 2015 is still as it was in the 1980s. This is doing a lot of harm to the country. And it will also do a lot of harm to the government. It will bite back." This makes it sound as 'tribalism' were uniquely coming from the party in government… "It comes from both. Let me point towards myself instead. When I used to speak about the importance of finding common solutions, you would get some people internally saying: this is not the way we should be doing things; we should be more vociferous, more negative… This is tribalism. And there is a large group of people out there – this is my per- ception, by the way, I have no statis- tical evidence for it – that is getting tired of it." This raises an automatic question. Looking at the Nationalist Party to- day, how in tune with is it with what Grech is talking about right now? Is he a lone voice in his call for a para- digm shift? "I don't think so. I also think that even the recent policy alignment of the shadow reshuffle was prompted by a need to respond to this public demand." He points out that the new shadow cabinet structure assigns 'clusters' of MPs (Grech has two colleagues on his team) to each portfolio. It's no longer a case of one individual claim- ing to know everything. "So the party is taking stock of the situation, and revising its structures accordingly." All the same, some people within the party may be concerned that there has been too little progress so far. The PN has failed to recover significantly from its 2013 ratings, despite a change in leadership and all the above-mentioned structural reforms. It has also been suggested that part of the reason is that new leadership is too closely associated with the old. We are now on the threshold of another electoral test; and it might not be an exaggeration to describe this as a test of Busuttil's own leadership. Does Grech agree, and… does the possibility of a leadership contest interest him personally? Does he see himself as a possible future PN leader? "Let me start with this: I disagree with those who say the problem is the leadership. We have to under- stand that we're coming out of a very difficult period for a political party. We lost an election heavily. It's no secret that the PN is not accustomed to being in Opposition. Just like La- bour wasn't accustomed in 1987. I believe that it is only natural that any party coming out of such a huge de- feat, by local standards, would find it difficult to come out it at a fast pace. This was the uphill struggle faced by this leadership team. It's very easy for someone who is not part of that team to say this, that or the other. But if there is an issue with the PN's political performance, it is not an issue for the leader alone. It's a col- lective issue. With regard to my own role: I'm part of the team, and my objective is to do as much as I can so that the Nationalist Party returns to government. So any talk of who's go- ing to be the next leader, or the one after that… it's all pointless, because our job is to ensure that the current leader will eventually become prime minister." Interview The challenges facing Malta's economic infrastructure in the long term are too weighty to be solved by tribal politics. Shadow economy minister CLAUDIO GRECH calls for a consensual approach wand' solutions PHOTOGRAPHY BY RAY ATTARD