I broadly agree with this insider’s guest view about what should be happening next in the PN.
Except that I think all the people in this picture have a responsibility, vested in them by election to their post, to move to act.
People are right: Adrian Delia was elected to his post.
So were Robert Arrigo, David Agius, Clyde Puli, Mark Anthony Sammut, Kristy Debono, David Stellini, Roselyn Borg Knight and David Cammilleri.
Part of the job they were elected to is to step up when there’s a gap on top, or when there should be.
from its leader’s nasty separation process.
When the Nationalist Party reformed its statute in 1974, it specifically opted for a wide distribution of power within the party. It was reacting to the overbearing power of Borg Olivier in the 1960s and up to the early 1970s.
The previous statute made the party leader president of all organs of the party. This changed in 1974 and the Nationalist Party since then has had a powerful Secretary General and three organs with three different presidents: the General Council whose president is at present Kristy Debono, the Executive Committee led by Mark Anthony Sammut and the Administrative Committee presided over by David Stellini.
For anyone who has studied political science, what the PN did in 1974 was a movement from one model to another of how political parties are organised in Europe. The previous model was leader-centric, the way the Conservative Party in Britain is organised, for example: a new leader is elected and s/he’s given a free hand in choosing all party officials. The other model is more continental and balanced: the party leader is primus inter pares and there are organs to defend the party from becoming the image of its leader and to set policy more collectively representing all the party. This is what the present PN statute wants.
With the PN leader’s wife now in open warfare with her husband, the organs of the party need to come to life to defend the PN from the irreparable damage Adrian Delia’s leadership has already wrought on the party, and the even more severe damage the PN risks suffering if the grave allegations now doing the rounds in email and messages surface in the traditional press to Labour’s delight.
But the plight Adrian Delia and his coterie have brought the PN to is evident from the comatose state the General Council and the Executive and Administrative Committees of the PN are in. Mark Anthony Sammut, Kristy Debono and David Stellini have huge responsibilities to PN members and voters. They need to act in the interest of the party, not their own or Adrian Delia’s. They lead bodies that should have already met to chart the way forward for a party whose leader is embroiled in a separation case he himself turned very nasty on Xarabank and in Court on Christmas eve, and which could turn even nastier.
And please, stop arguing about Adrian Delia as if he were a private citizen. He’s not; he’s Leader of the Opposition and Prime Minister-in-waiting. If he can’t run his private life and make a clean break with his wife, how the hell does he aspire to run a main party in Malta and, eventually, the country? Not even health issues are private matters for politicians, let alone the fact that Adrian Delia has disastrously put his foot into a separation process already fraught with risks for the party he leads.
Messrs Sammut, Debono and Stellini, apply the defibrillator. Nationalist members and voters and the country in general want to see a PN that is alive, with organs that function properly and that can deal with its leader’s botched separation process. This is the only way people can then have some faith that the PN could eventually deal with a much bigger problem: the organised crime that now inhabits Castile.