The two mainstream parties will already be well into their analysis of the final outcome of the European Parliamentary elections. In the stillness of their internal quarters they will squeeze out every possible reading and apply it to scenario building moving forward. The basic question - how best to position for the general election - will persist throughout the coming four years, updated with every local council elections result, and with opinion polls commissioned regularly.

The Labour Party will not stop at savouring the blindingly obvious - it has scored a famous victory, giving its new leader the best first-year birthday present Joseph Muscat could get. The party was expected to win three of the five MEP seats under contention. Practically nobody expected it would also win the sixth (observer) seat. Two days into the counting of the votes the Nationalist media were desperately spinning the line that Labour was disappointed because it would not win a fourth seat.

The way the single transferable system allows voters to express cross preferences, zigzagging among individual candidates, ripped that spin apart. It caused the Nationalists a defeat bigger than the first-count preference total. That particular outcome was misery enough for the PN. Labour had not simply won the expected three seats - it had overwhelmed the party in government.

A hell full of devils lay in the detail. Labour polled almost 6,000 votes less than in the 2008 general election and some Nationalists found comfort in that. Until, that is, they realised that the PN comparable vote had fallen by six times as much. Also, the 21,000-vote drubbing of the MEP elections of 2004 had soared by two-thirds.

Nearly a fifth of the electorate did not pick up the vote or cast it. Some Nationalists sought solace from that, saying the absentees had not felt impelled to trust Labour. The reaction epitomised the sight of a drowning man clutching at straws.

A shell-shocked Prime Minister found relief in a basic factor - the result was not as good as the PN had hoped for, but neither was it as bad as it had feared. That is true. Until Lawrence Gonzi ordered his parliamentary team to go out and knock on doors, his party stood to gain some three to five percentage points fewer than it actually did.

That fact will be central to the analysis which the Nationalists will make, placed in the context of a reading which swiftly came through in their various public statements that the government had not been sensitive enough to what the electorate had been saying all along.

I wonder whether the two factors will lead the government, egged on by the party, to make a fundamental mistake in terms of our democratic set-up.

There is a strong possibility that government members will henceforth attempt to bend over backwards to meet the individual demands placed upon them. To the extent that this is part of an overall effort to make the public administration more efficient and objectively responsive to the public, all well and good. To the extent that it will imply latent favouritism and giving in to unjustified pressure, it will be a very bad outcome. Not an original outcome - previous governments, Nationalist and Labour, acted that way at times.

Yet it will be bad because that is not what democratic government means. It would also be bad in strategic terms. Individual needs count, of course they do. And they should be cared for where they are genuine. But such needs come from a relatively small percentage of constituents. In my ministerial and opposition MP days I used to find that the bulk of voters never approached me with any personal request.

What matters, in fact, is not simply micro-managing individuals. It is policies that affect the whole populations and, where they can be dissected, strata of it that count. Water and electricity bills, especially the harsh estimates issued after the tariffs regime was introduced, did not simply affect individuals. They affected the whole of society, including the institutional partners who are normally prepared to help a Nationalist government along.

It will be public policies that tell between now and the general election - why they are drafted, how they are presented, discussed, finalised and implemented. That will apply to the opposition as well. Muscat's campaign targeted the whole population as well as individual groups. In the coming years that policy will continue. Every bit of discontent will be used.

Yet, in preparing to assume the burden of government, to gain penetrating credibility with the required margin of non-partisan voters the PL will need clear alternative policies.

It will not need to commit itself to fine detail. It would be wrong, in fact, to give hostages to fortune as it did in the car registration tax issue. But it will have to build and ultimately present policies that are pertinent to the country as a whole, while not failing to show due care and compassion for the least fortunate among us.

As Muscat put it, last week was a start, there is much distance left to the finishing post of the general election. The policy vehicles used along the way will be tested by an increasingly discerning middle ground of the electorate.

Meanwhile, 2009 EP memories are best for Muscat, who grew six inches taller; for Simon Busuttil and Louis Grech, whose first count preferences showed that the electorate does follow how its MEPs perform; and for Arnold Cassola who, by announcing he will be bowing out as leader of the Alternattiva Demokratika, demonstrated that dignity can also emerge victorious in defeat.

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