Thank You Bernard Grech? For What – More Failure?

The PN’s Pathetic Farewell to Another Failed Leader

The Times of Malta published an opinion piece by Jean Paul Barbara, vice president of MŻPN, praising Bernard Grech’s leadership of the Nationalist Party. The article, dripping with sycophantic nostalgia, reads like a eulogy for a man who spent five years achieving absolutely nothing of substance.

Barbara describes Grech’s tenure as “a pivotal chapter characterised by calm determination, unity and public accountability.” In reality, Grech’s chapter was marked by chronic indecision, pathetic polling figures, and the continued decline of a party now rotting from within.

The PN under Bernard Grech remained a party of internal conspiracies, backstabbing factions, and recycled failures posing as “fresh faces.” Yes, the party won eight local councils, but it lost national credibility. It regained the third MEP seat – but that was not thanks to Grech’s leadership. It was a direct result of Labour voters staying home in protest, disgusted by their own party’s arrogance. Grech did nothing to inspire those votes. They fell into his lap by default.

Barbara says “Grech managed to renew the PN parliamentary group.” Renew with what? A group of MPs who remain invisible, incompetent, and obsessed with selfies and hollow statements. The same MPs who have failed to shift a single decimal in national support for the PN.

This opinion piece exposes the PN’s real problem: a culture of mediocrity where even abject failure is celebrated as historic achievement. Where losing an election by 40,000 votes is rebranded as a “significant shift in public sentiment.” Where leaders with no vision are lauded as unifiers simply because they managed to keep rival cliques from killing each other – for now.

Bernard Grech leaves the PN exactly where he found it: in opposition, fragmented, with no message, no credibility, and no hope. If anything, his leadership accelerated the party’s decay, with more MPs abandoning internal discipline and chasing personal brand-building over party strategy.

Jean Paul Barbara

Jean Paul Barbara ends by calling for unity under the next leader, be it Alex Borg or Adrian Delia. But unity around what? Around the same tired faces that destroyed the party’s public standing? Around a recycled Delia, or a superficial Alex Borg, whose popularity is built entirely on social media reels?

This is the truth the PN refuses to face. Leadership changes will not save them. No amount of “thank you, Bernard Grech” articles will erase the fact that Labour remains the only political force trusted to govern Malta.

If the Nationalist Party wants to remain in denial, praising a failed leader for “integrity” while ignoring its collapse, then it truly deserves its fate as a historical footnote, forever stuck in nostalgia while Malta moves forward without it.