The heat is on at PN HQ. The 80 strong executive is meeting having been summoned by Adrian Delia. It’s time for a showdown with the 19 rebels showing no sign of surrendering their battle after the setback suffered by the hapless Presidential decision.
What would seem to be another long night has been kick started by another motion of confidence in Delia brought by Dr Michael Axiaq. The vicissitudes of the renewed PN leadership race is actually a tiny pixel in the much bigger landscape of the state of our political system. What interests me here is why the rebels insist on staying. Why the battle they are fighting is the battle, first and foremost, for the Nationalist Party.
Therese Comodini Cachia was quoted as saying that “it is not her intention to split the party”. Chris Said seems to be of the same opinion. And so on and so forth. Not for one second does the option of splitting from the PN and setting up a rival, larger, opposition party seem to have crossed their minds.
Make no mistake about what is happening here. Much as the rebels might be seen as voices for change away from the shady politics represented by Delia and the corrupt government, their inability to create a definite schism between themselves and the old wreck of a party they aspire to win back is telling.
The pull of the party is too great and that is the sign that the rebels, no matter how rebellious, are only willing to go so far to change the stagnant system that has a stranglehold on the nation. They are unable to cut off their dependency on a party system built to fit a constitution wrought in its image, and designed to fit a sick method of pathetic alternation like a glove.
I have written elsewhere that a new PN would have to renege everything it has been until now otherwise those who take over will only be prone to the same mistakes that have been committed in the past.
The rotten system that has taken hold of the nation is fighting back tooth and nail. Like zombies in a trance some participants in the political arena unwillingly lend themselves to the system’s fight for survival. Yesterday’s Presidential decision was such an example of the system’s desperate lurches at self-preservation.
Tonight, in the long night of knives and squaring of thoughts, another tentacle of the system attempts to survive to the detriment of a switch towards a healthier constitution.
We are a long, long way from recovery.
“If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.” Dwight D. Eisenhower.
