Until a few years ago one political mantra was that the environment should not be politicised. One of the other parties started it and the other rapidly caught up in dishing it out. What utter nonsense.

Today, we have a government that has made the environment one of its three policy pillars. Nobody mouths the mantra anymore. For those who had worked out some of the economic, social and cultural implications of the most innocent of environmental issues, it had never made sense.

Clearly everybody wants to breathe clean air. There is no foul air party. Still, it is far too facile to conclude that since good air quality is a common cause, it can best be served by being placed above partisan politics. How will we address air quality challenges? What changes in behaviour will be identified as necessary? How will they be prioritised? Why?

A technocrat could design a plan quite easily but politicians will have different ideas of what the electorate will stand. Politicians from different political parties will approach the matter differently. Some would prefer a top down approach and others a bottom up approach. Some will want to allow things to mature (omnipresent smog), others will want to anticipate crises. Some will be satisfied with minimum compliance with EU standards, others will aim higher.

A political party aiming to top the 50 per cent mark must go with the flow. One spearheading advances in this particular sector and with no such ambitions will be able to speak more clearly, have more definite targets and push much harder, with greater focus. Political parties behave differently because they have different agendas, different values, different electoral hurdles to overcome. Above all, they have different support. Party A with a deferential right wing support can claim superior even secret knowledge to justify its neglect or inconsistency and get away with it.

Party B with a support base from the extreme left to centre right will be sensitive to any job loses and will not weigh them against health gains and new jobs to be found thanks to the improvements. Party C has a support fully informed on the issue and fully aware of the human and economic costs of neglect. Its support is focused and unforgiving of any wavering or compromises.

Everybody still wants clean air but there are choices to be made on how it can be achieved, when it should be achieved and what price should be paid to secure it.

That is why we have political parties. That is why there is almost nothing under the sun that can be left out. It is not because political parties exploit issues that should be sacred and immune. They take up issues which people, potential voters, show some concern about. What is truly remarkable in fact is that Malta sticks with the two-party paradigm: Most issues very naturally produce far more opinions than just two.

Ironically, it is just this that seems to produce the recurring demand for the exclusion of partisan politics. Two-party politics produces a yes-no, all black or all white reduction to absurdity of every issue. It is intellectually offensive, almost painful. Constant confrontation is exhausting, a boring extravagance, especially to people who come to recognise that the simplifications of complex issues do not satisfy them. Because they have become convinced that, more often than not, neither of the two opposed positions are theirs, they opt for none at all: no partisan politics, no politics.

The escalation of partisan competition in the election of the students' representative body has produced a third "independent" entity. Over-investment of funds and energies in lobbying students for their votes convinced a significant fraction that the matter had become a power struggle between the other political parties quite apart from the youth or student issues that were supposed to be addressed.

It is a process I recognise. It is what took me from the NGO world into politics proper. Regardless of the rhetoric, politics had become a violent, naked power struggle. Today the rhetoric is even more devoid of content and there is no violence. More and more people are pushed into rejecting the whole mess. Tell the students who formed the "independent" electoral grouping that they had formed a political party and they may cringe in horror, recoil in anger. They have.

A political party is a group of persons who contest an election together. That's it. Something brings them together. Even if it is only reaction to the pre-existing state of affairs, it is something: an agenda. Ironically, the struggle to be free of any ideology is itself an ideology, perhaps the most dangerous and destabilising of all. That our university students are brought to such a pass is significant. They are the ones who should be defining their positions, expressing them clearly, adopting a political thought.

Their priority is to escape the two-party stagnation. They have had the opportunity of their election in which the other political parties have participated under the usual see-through disguises. Others have not. Most people have only local and general elections to act in. Perhaps because this is the turf of political parties proper, the party of independents has not yet put in an appearance. Perhaps it would seem to be more clearly a contradiction in terms. A party of independents? Independent of what? Of partisan politics? A party independent of partisan politics?

There is something so fundamentally contradictory in all this. It is a rejection of the existing order without any proposal other than the rejection. It is a political vacuum in love with itself. Or is it?

It is a vacuum only if the people within the alliance, expressed in the university election or without self-awareness as in the mass of people absenting themselves from the local council elections, do not have opinions. I have every reason to believe that they do. My guess is that they have very different opinions. What we are witnessing is an unravelling of the bonds of party loyalty.

The two other parties, which have been a lesser form of religion to many people, are losing their faithful. The young are not taking up the belief in the first place. More than that, there is a strong aversion to political beliefs systems so utterly and transparently devoid of content. The absence of the political violence of yesteryear is the absence of a centrifugal and polarising force.

While the majority remain loyal or dissident but within the confines of their party as though it were the sole explanation of the universe, a significant minority refuses to accept any flat earth proposal. They have broken out. They will not be back.

Some will enjoy the privilege of being a minority of one. Many will feel they have accomplished enough simply by opting out. Some others will seek to express themselves in the company of like-minded persons. Some will decide that the best way to challenge the two-party system effectively is to back the Greens. Some will be drawn to us because we make sense to them and others because they sense the urgency to bring about a gentle and profound reform that will alter our political landscape forever. We live in interesting times.

The Green party is a political party. We know we are. We have contested several elections together. We have kept up our challenge to the political status quo for 17 long years. Our driving force is the recognition of the need to make optimal use of scarce resources in a truly sustainable manner safeguarding the seed-corn of future generations. Our greatest fault may be that we were ahead of our time. We are a very long way from where we first started and now the air is pregnant with potential.

Dr Vassallo is chairman of Alternattiva Demokratika - the Green party.

www.alternattiva.org.mt, www.adgozo.com

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