Bloggers have been chipping in on the future of the Green Party following its abysmal performance at the EP election earlier this month. Most of them are present or former officials or, at least, sympathisers so one cannot doubt their bona fides when they give advice.
Most of what they propose mistakes means for ends, not unlike Nationalists’ attempts at soul-searching, which assume that doing things differently will result in outcomes which are both different and desirable. That, as everyone should know, is not necessarily the case.
But even if it were, that can, at most, be described as some sort of tactics and strategy which a party in such a parlous state would need. The only proposal which comes close to being the latter (except, that is, for Michael Briguglio’s suggestion to go “radical”) is to have the Party build a strong presence at the level of local government where electing representatives has higher political and mathematical chances and, having built the foundations (or, to be greener, grown grassroots), get a fighting chance to score some success in general election.
That might be good approach. But the Greens have been there before. In the first ever electoral cycle of local councils (1993-94) the Greens managed to elect no less than eight local councillors: in Attard, Balzan, Birkirkara, Ħamrun, in the Labour stronghold of Pembroke and even south of the Maltese Weisswuräkwator in Fgura.
Now, I’m in no position to know whether this was the result of a deliberate strategic choice of the Party. But when you compare the number of candidates fielded by the Party in the 1993-94 cycle — 30 candidates in localities all across the country — to the 16 candidates fielded in the latest cycle (2007-2009) standing almost exclusively in “favourable” localities you realise that then the Party was trying harder.
With the wisdom of some hindsight we know that the Greens’ presence at a local level was not of much consequence. The Greens failed to make any impact in the 1996 general election and were decimated in local elections in the subsequent electoral cycles. Change of strategy? Possibly. But it is more likely that here was a case where the national impinged on the local. The Greens’ 1993-94 local successes followed a comfortable Nationalist general election victory in 1992 and their subsequent defeats followed (or just preceded) a Nationalist defeat in the general election in 1996.
An important thing happened in the last EP election. Until now the fact that Labour “won” local and European elections not because it attracted votes but because would-be Nationalist voters stayed at home, gave some justified hope to the governing Party that it’s supporters could be counted upon come general election day. This time round Labour won unequivocally. True, an EP election victory is not immediately translatable into a general election victory but this time Labour’s case of a Party attractive to voters will be stronger. That means that that is less opportunity for the Greens to act as some sort of “half-way house” if, come 2013, voters desert the Nationalist Party.
That may not be a certitude but it’s a liklihood nonetheless. Which adds to the urgency of James’ call for the Party to divest itself of the role it has played for the last two decades or, rather, for the period the Nationalists were in government.
Of course, that it has acted in this role for so long will make it difficult to step out of . Briguglio’s call for more “radicalism”, whatever that means, is hardly a receipe for expanding the Party’s voter base enough to take more serious jolts than the one received some weeks ago. So while it is good to see someone like Carmel Cacopardo so sanguine about the result, the Green Party current predicament is probably rosy in comparison to a post-Nationalist scenario.
