While Opposition Leader Simon Busuttil is basking in the glow of Joseph Muscat's scandals, lack of transparency and inaction over his close associates, No-Portfolio Minister Konrad Mizzi and Chief of Staff Keith Schembri, he too has a dilemma at hand, an issue which will not wash away in the run-up to the election.
PN MP Toni Bezzina is Busuttil's star candidate of the South. This may seem an exaggeration at first glance but if one had to ponder and analyse what Toni Bezzina means to a Nationalist Party, whose links with the southern districts reached an abyssal low during the last election, then the title of 'star-candidate' would start to fit Mr Bezzina. As much as Labour needed Konrad Mizzi to lure those pale-blue voters who by 2013 had had enough of the Gonzi administration but never quite synced with the likes of Alfred Sant and Labour's entourage from the 1980s, the PN leader knows very well that Toni Bezzina cannot be easily replaced at district level, just like Giovanna Debono made way for Chris Said to reap the spoils of the 13th district.
Mr Bezzina is a product of Labour's trade schools, son of modest parents from Mqabba, who graduated to become an architect. He fills that void, ever so hard for the PN to conquer, by speaking in layman's terms and mingling with the crowd who eat 'pastizzi' from a saucer and drink tea in a glass. The working class who find it hard to make ends meet and who don't give a hoot if the minister has a multi-million dollar outfit in a remote place on the other side of the globe as long as they can provide the basics for their loved ones at the end of each week.
He, and others of his kind within the PN, have the unattractive task to sell the PN's high environmental standards packaged in fancy reports and cluttered with definitions that will scare the rural community and their kin if not translated by the likes of Toni Bezzina. This must have been the thinking behind the idea to get Mr Bezzina to co-sign the PN's environmental wish list.
But Toni Bezzina cannot run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, because that is exactly what he did when he applied to restore and build on ODZ land in Rabat. The Labour Party's newspaper Kulħadd was right in pointing out that while Mr Bezzina wasn't trying to break the law he surly wasn't honouring his party's environmental commitment. One would wish that Kulħadd adopts the same yardstick when it comes to politicians from its own fold, but that's besides the point here.
The Labour Party knows very well that Toni Bezzina speaks the language of its core electorate and they must have concluded that whatever he's doing in the trenches of the 5th district is working; otherwise they wouldn't have leaked such a story to its own newspaper which publishes, nearly exclusively, for a hard-core Labour audience.
Simon Busuttil must have reached the same conclusion for the opposite reason when he rushed, on the Sunday the news was out, to first quash Bezzina's application in the hope to keep in check the environmentalists who are slowly warming up to the PN, then followed up by trying to defend his star candidate of the south not to disrupt the momentum in growing support by Mr Bezzina's voter base.
But for him to retain credibility on environmental matters, Dr Busuttil must take drastic action. One does understand the dilemma he is facing because, to bring down Joseph Muscat, he surely needs all the help from each corner of the land, but voters need the comfort that if they dare trust the PN again in office, no one will try to slip under the party's declared principles for personal gain. The PN should ask Toni Bezzina not to contest the next election but continue working in the interest of the nation by convincing people in villages that the party is trustworthy precisely because it demanded that he steps down. If he intends to persist in his political career further then he can be considered for the following election. Such was the case with another PN candidate in the south.
from The Malta Independent http://ift.tt/2mIkduD
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