One of the ironies of the result of the last general election is that the Nationalist Party and its supporters seem to be blaming Alternattiva Demokratika (AD) for the perverse permutations of our country's electoral system.
In this way, AD is perceived as having brought the country to the brink of a potential "disaster" with the MLP obtaining fewer votes than the PN but having more seats in Parliament.
This is indeed well and truly the mother of all ironies for a party which has suffered ever since its inception from an unjust and unfair electoral system. The crude truth is that the PN has been in government for over 20 years and has had all the time in the world to change the electoral system to avoid the potential "disaster" Lawrence Gonzi was complaining about after the elections.
The cruder truth is that the PN and the MLP have repeatedly avoided going for a truly democratic and just reform of the electoral system and have instead chosen to tinker with the electoral system with incredibly blinkered partisan short-sightedness.
They are solely to blame for the potentially "disastrous" situation AD is now being held responsible for.
The last amendments to the electoral law agreed between the PN and the MLP late in 2007 are a glaring example of this partisan short-sightedness. The amendments were trumpeted as the end of all problems related to the gerrymandering of electoral districts.
Strict proportionality between votes and seats in Parliament was depicted as doing away once and for all with the risk of a so-called "perverse" result.
There again the PN and the MLP conveniently failed to emphasise that this strict proportionality between votes and seats was limited only to a situation where only two parties are elected to Parliament. In the case of a third party being elected, this strict proportionality clause would not come into effect. In their haste to create a system to fit their myopic vision of what democratic representation should be all about, the PN and MLP chose partisan expediency over the national interest. Last year, only AD pointed out the inherent risk of such a system still leaving the possibility of gerrymandered districts creating a perverse result.
This year we were proved right. The cruel political irony is that in some way we are being blamed for a system exclusively concocted by the PN and MLP and which AD had repeatedly and strongly criticised.
One positive result of the last general election is that, finally, this repeated tinkering by the PN and the MLP with our electoral system has now come to a dead end.
The need for a just and fair electoral system is there for all to see. Lawrence Gonzi is on record as saying that such a reform is now a priority. After an electoral campaign in which truth was the first casualty of spin, one can only hope that the Prime Minister will try to regain the high moral ground by proposing an electoral system that is truly in the national interest.
Early rumblings from Joe Saliba suggesting a 7.5 per cent national threshold of votes for parliamentary representation are not encouraging. That would fly in the face of the EU norm, making it closer to non-EU Turkey's 10 per cent threshold than the threshold of any EU country currently using such a system.
Whatever the reform proposed, one hopes that the national interest will prevail over the partisan interests of the major parties.
Above all, one hopes that all those opinion makers and bloggers who got so hysterical about the AD risk during the last electoral campaign will now pull themselves out of the mud they have repeatedly slung at AD and start calling with their customary insistence for a just, fair and democratic electoral reform that truly reflects the national interest.
Mr Cachia is deputy chairman of Alternattiva Demokratika - The Green Party.