Continues from yesterday’s article on ‘the Maltese Enlightenment’

Part 4: Children of the Moon

In an Eye in the Sky Realm, the worshippers live in the light basking in all the resources that the high priest rewards them with. By contrast, the non-worshippers have to live in the dark. They are the children of the moon. The lyrics of Alan Parsons Project song are a bitter apologetic lament.

Pay no attention to the writing on the wall
The words seem empty because there’s nothing there at all
We let the wise men beat the drum too soon
We were just children of the moon
No one to turn to
Nowhere to run to even if we could
Too late to save us but try to understand
The seas were empty there was hunger in the land
We let the blind man lead the way too long
Easy to see where we went wrong

The anti-Labour electorate is a dejected, confused mixed bag:

  1. The environmentalists who were empowered by Lawrence Gonzi though they were and still are, no friends of the Nationalist Party. Nonetheless, they have been emasculated by Labour to accommodate their new middle class of capitalists.
  2. The Nationalists who were beguiled by Labour’s pre-electoral psychobabble only to belatedly see that Labour in opposition and Labour in government are two different diametrically opposed Jekyll & Hyde parties.
  3. Older Nationalist voters, angry with the younger generation for not heeding their warning that Labour’s party ways can never change. Their forebears knew this from personal experience having lived through Dom Mintoff’s dark times. They are aware of the sacrifices and efforts the Nationalist government undertook to develop Malta up to a level that these neophyte voters took for granted.
  4. The Adrian Delia faction who are deluded into thinking that they can defeat Labour if they use the same methods Labour uses.
  5. The equally deluded traditional Nationalists who maintain that Adrian Delia’s removal is the harbinger of an eventual election victory. 

Although it is true that Adrian Delia is a liability with no future in the party, the party will still remain unelectable, even if they were to elect a fine leader in the mould of Eddie Fenech Adami.

As Daphne Caruana Galizia had pointed out, the Nationalist voter base is constantly shrinking because of the lower birth rate and because of a higher emigration rate for greener pastures. If Maltese emigrés were to vote electronically as in more civilised countries, that would be a different matter altogether. But the avariciously  undemocratic Labour Party will never permit that as it may well be their death knell.

Adrian Delia has had a disastrous honeymoon period. He has done nothing right. In an election, during a honeymoon period, one is to expect (at the very least) a significant increase in votes over their predecessor. Anything less than that is an abysmal failure.

This election heralds the end of his honeymoon. If he were to stay on without a significant increase of votes, the haemorrhage of votes will only  intensify all the way to the next general election. The Nationalists will then seriously risk inflicting a mortal blow against democracy by awarding Labour a two-thirds majority.

Dom Mintoff’s dream of a one-party state will materialise.

So what are the Nationalists to do?

Continues tomorrow.