The paradoxes of Saturday's results

A lot can be taken for granted about next Saturday's local council elections, so it is worth pausing on two paradoxical aspects of the results: First, the Nationalist Party will be hurt, in part, by the Malta Labour Party's perceived inadequacy. Second, local council elections will punish both parties for pursuing an excessively local, bottom-up approach to politics.

When I say that both the PN and the MLP will be punished I do not mean, of course, that the MLP will not emerge a clear winner. My guess is that it will improve on its 2002 performance by some three percentile points. But I anticipate that, when scrutinised, the result will contain the same disturbing signs shown by the political attitudes survey published by The Sunday Times a few days ago: An important segment of the core Labour vote is disenchanted with the party's leadership.

This segment, together with another segment of potential swing voters, sees a party entangled in its rhetoric. It claims to speak on behalf of 13,000 voters in Marsa and Zejtun who will not have a local election (thanks to the tactical withdrawal of four PN candidates) - but in the same breath the MLP cancels 143,000 votes when it continues to insist that the EU referendum was not won by the yes vote.

On another front, the party offers a non-committal set of policy proposals; its leader and senior deputy leader meet with constituted bodies to see what they think of these proposals; late last year Charles Mangion boasted that no one had (up to that point) criticised the document; but then, when confronted with the implications of certain individual proposals, the party seems to shrink from considering them even as a basis for discussion.

Ordinarily one would expect the perceived inadequacy of the MLP on the policy front to be of benefit to the PN. It might yet do so. Yet in the short to medium term, the MLP's inadequacy is actually hurting the PN.

Voters are of course already angry about the tough fiscal measures and mistakes that have been made. But there is something else that voters will never tell the pollsters, even though they might informally talk about it all the time: The lack of a credible alternative to a party that has been long in power is making voters seethe with rage at their dependency on the PN as a party of government.

The anger that voters will express against the PN on Saturday might yet show a silver lining. When people are angry with you, it is usually because they expect you to change your behaviour. The worst thing that can befall a political party is polite indifference: It means voters have given up on you. Still, it says something about the electoral difficulties of the PN when voter anger is a silver lining.

There is another paradoxical feature to next Saturday's expected result. This is not, as such, the fact that voters will use local council elections to express their judgment of the national performance of the government - that is standard practice at every local council election, here and everywhere. But what this particular election will show is that a segment of the PN core vote is disenchanted by the excessively piece-meal and local nature of the government's work.

The national government appears to have decided on a jigsaw puzzle approach to the kind of upgrades and structural transformations the country needs. It knows what it wants to do over the next three years. It is working in a piece-meal way on several fronts, the same way one solves a jigsaw by working simultaneously on different, disjointed parts of the picture - in the belief, and hope, that the various works will be joined up in a coherent, positive way in time for the next general election.

It is a bottom-up approach. Some results can be seen on a local level but it all seems too little, of not enough significance. There is no vision of a big picture, yet, to magnetise how people look at what is going on in their locality. They might see what is being done but cannot see its larger significance, a meaningful sense of direction.

If I read the situation correctly, the government is betting that time will heal this wound, as the big picture emerges from the joined-up little pieces. I am not so sure. If too much time passes without a big picture, the wound might fester, not heal.

ranierfsadni@europe.com