The PN’s next battle: can Bernard Grech sell a new dream to a nation that stopped listening?

Żebbuġ, 7 a.m. The bell of the parish church is still echoing across the square when Raymond Bajada, 71, unfolds a plastic chair outside the PN club and lights the first cigarette of the day. The club’s green-and-white flag is frayed at the edges; inside, campaign posters from 2017 curl on the wall like old homework nobody bothered to take down. “We used to win elections from this square,” Raymond says, exhaling smoke towards the statue of Santa Filomena. “Now we win arguments on Facebook and lose everything else.”

His verdict is brutal, but not unusual. After a third consecutive landslide defeat, the Nationalist Party is once again asking itself the question that has haunted it since 2013: what is it for? The leadership contest that never materialised leaves Bernard Grech with a second chance he never expected, yet the battlefield has shifted under his feet. The enemy is no longer just Labour; it is irrelevance.

Walk five minutes down the hill to the market and you feel the shift. Stallholders who once wore blue rosaries now flirt with ADPD or simply shrug. “They all end up the same,” says Graziella, weighing tomatoes into a reused Tal-Familja bag. “At least Labour sends the cheques on time.” Her comment lands like a dagger in the heart of every PN activist who believed the party stood for something nobler than direct deposit.

Yet dismissing Graziella as cynical misses the point. Maltese politics has always been transactional – remember the “biċċa ħobż” legend of Mintoff? – but the transaction has changed. Labour sells concrete: wage supplements, fuel subsidies, construction permits that arrive faster than a Gozo Channel ferry. The PN, still speaking the language of values, sounds like a priest preaching abstinence at a village festa: admirable, perhaps, but wildly out of sync with the music blasting from the beer tent.

Grech’s first task, then, is to re-learn the Maltese art of storytelling. On Gozo, that means promising the tunnel but also the return of the 15-minute ferry crossing. In Sliema, it means vowing to cap tower heights without insulting the homeowners whose retirement is literally rising with every extra floor. In Paola, it means convincing young voters that a party whose MPs still quote 1987 TV debates can regulate crypto and OnlyFans.

The cultural challenge is enormous. Labour has weaponised nostalgia for the Mintoff years; the PN’s nostalgia is for Fenech Adami’s, a memory that freezes anyone under 35 out of the picture. To them, “Eddie” is a roundabout, not a saviour. Grech must therefore craft a new myth, one that folds environmental rage, cost-of-living anxiety and post-covid cynicism into a single narrative. The closest he has come so far is the slogan “Malta tagħna lkoll” – but hashtags don’t eat, and voters remember.

Still, there are glimmers. The party’s youth wing, MŻPN, recently crowd-funded a TikTok channel that mocks Robert Abela’s gym selfies faster than Labour’s trolls can report it. In Valletta, PN mayor Alfred Zammit has turned heritage walks into subtle recruitment drives: “You can’t hate the European Capital of Culture while loving Europe,” he whispers to tourists snapping photos of restored façades. Even Raymond in Żebbuġ admits his grandson attended a climate protest organised by PN activists. “He came home saying ‘Għandna nħarsu l-art.’ I nearly cried.”

The next battle, then, will not be fought in Parliament TV soundbites but in these small conversions: the grandson who drags his nannu to a clean-up, the Gozitan farmer who realises ODZ means his son won’t inherit fields of concrete, the Sliema waitress who connects rent hikes to planning policies. Grech must turn those flickers into a prairie fire before Labour rebrands itself again – perhaps as the party that delivers €200 “festa bonuses” straight to your Revolut.

Back in the square, Raymond flicks his cigarette into the bin and folds his chair. “We don’t need a new flag,” he says. “We need a new story that starts with the old one.” He pauses, glancing at the statue. “Santa Filomena protected us from plague. Maybe she can protect us from indifference.”

The bell tolls again. Somewhere in the narrow streets, a door slams, a dog barks, a child laughs. The next battle for the PN begins here: in the everyday noise of a country that has stopped waiting for heroes and started waiting for Deliveroo. If Bernard Grech can turn that wait into hope, he might yet write a new chapter. If not, the club’s flag will keep fraying until it becomes just another relic, folded away like Raymond’s chair when the day grows too hot.