Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/844299
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 2 JULY 2017 24 Opinion ' L eadership': such an easy word to say... but so goddamn difficult to define. What does it even mean, anyway? I suppose it's a question we must sooner or later confront, seeing as at least one of the two major parties in this country is in the process of choosing a new leader. And as can easily be attested by the last six or seven times the PN or PL faced the same dilemma... the decision is arguably more important than the electoral choice of a new government. Certainly, its effects on the party last longer than an electoral victory or defeat. Political parties can always survive a spell in Opposition. What can prove seriously detrimental to their survival chances, however – sometimes keeping them in opposition for decades on the trot – is the lack of any persuasive long-term direction or vision. Strangely, however, neither of those two parties seems to even be aware of this fact. Only this can explain why both – in their own, admittedly different ways – have doggedly refused to ever evolve beyond the primitive political paradigm whereby 'the leader' is the only source of anything resembling a political identity. Let's take Labour as an example for a change. Not, perhaps, because the lack of serious leadership is more keenly felt in that party at the moment – it isn't, quite frankly, and that accounts for the main difference between their recent political fortunes. But Labour still somehow illustrates this particular aspect of Maltese politics better than the PN. At face value, Joseph Muscat may well be every inch the 'leader' the PL was yearning for after its two-decade spell in the wilderness. He has so far delivered exactly the sort of dream transformation many people – Labour, Nationalist, whatever – actually thought was impossible until only a few years ago. He has turned a permanent lame-duck party into a seemingly unstoppable election-winning machine. But just look for a moment at how much of that party he had to refashion in his own image and likeness, for that to actually work. Just consider how utterly dependent the Labour Party has now become on the identity of Joseph Muscat, to even have an identity of its own. This week, for instance, someone posted a throwback to the Labour Party's 'Partnership l-Ahjar Ghazla' days: a photo of a PL clubhouse somewhere, with a massive poster above the door saying, 'If we join the EU, we will be forced to introduce abortion and marriages between people of the same sex." Fast forward only 13 or so years, and while abortion remains nowhere to be seen or even contemplated... well, well, what do you know? The same Labour Party is now pushing a bill through parliament to legalise 'marriage between people of the same sex'– in other words, the same 'social evil' the Labour Party had warned us against when campaigning against the EU... not in the 19th century, mind you, but just the day before yesterday. That, alone, is a drastic political transformation by any country's standards. Yet neither Muscat nor Labour has so far even been challenged on a U-turn of such colossal proportions. There hasn't been so much as a squeak from the Opposition – and there are reasons for this, too: the PN has allowed itself to be browbeaten into a corner Just consider how utterly dependent the Labour Party has now become on the identity of Joseph Muscat, to even have an identity of its own Raphael Vassallo 'What the leader says, goes'