Lessons from two elections

Now that the dust has settled and the results of the European Parliament elections and the Local Council elections held the Saturday before last it is possible to share some thoughts on what the people have said by their vote.

Lesson No. 1 - Elections are won on the middle ground

The first lesson is that, once more, it has been amply proved that elections are now won by the party / political formation which captures the middle ground of the electorate. Labour has done this twice last week in winning by a landslide at both the European and Local Council elections. That is what a percentage approval of more than 52% is equivalent to in local terms. This is why, with a comfortable majority of 54% + under his belt, Labour leader, Joseph Muscat, has been insisting that this is the result of a new coalition being formed between the progressives and the moderates amongst the Maltese electorate. That coalition is found in the middle ground of the political spectrum not within the hard core extremes of either side of that spectrum.

Lesson No. 2 - It was a landslide but no guarantee of future success

From this, however, springs the second lesson. This landslide was won on a turn-out of 77%. Labour, therefore, needs to look more closely at these results in order to prepare itself for the ultimate show down which is the general election which must be held within four years' time.

Dr Joseph Muscat, is shrewd enough to know that this landslide victory, while a very good morale booster for his party and a vindication of his vision, is no guarantee of victory at the next general election. If a week is a long time in politics then four years is an eternity. Joseph Muscat knows this and that is why he has always insisted that this is the beginning, albeit a very good one, of the long journey on Labour's road to victory.

Labour's electoral strategists know that among the 23% who did not vote there a number, somewhere between 4 % and 7% of the electorate who will not bother voting at the next general elections.

Then there are the disgruntled Nationalist voters who wanted to make their point by blatantly not voting and finally there is a hard core of Labour voters who did not vote for two reasons.

The first group of these Labour non-voters are those who are still fundamentally opposed to EU membership and so will turn out to vote at the general elections.

The second hard core Labour group of abstainers are those who have still not forgiven Labour for the way it governed between 1996 and 1998. So the problem for Labour and Joseph Muscat is that they have to somehow square the circle in order to convince as many as possible of the potential 16% to 19% of last week's abstainers to vote Labour next time round.

In other words Labour has to continue to speak about this new coalition of moderates and progressives in order to woo these people towards it while also appealing to its own two hard core constituencies to get their vote as well.

Lesson No. 3 All elections are local

It has been repeated ad nauseam that the strategic mistake which contributed to the PN's worse defeat in 50 years was its decision to fight the MEP election on European issues rather than local ones.

So much has been admitted by some of the PN's unsuccessful candidates who said that this gave Labour the advantage of being allowed to set the agenda to which the PN and its candidates could only react in a defensive manner.

The PN's mistake lay in the fact that it did not realize that it could make European issues local issues and vice-versa. It cannot, for example, cry foul at Labour for "exploiting" the hospital waiting lists issue when this is also an EU issue thanks to the cross-border health care directive. Likewise, the PN could not expect Labour to hold back from attacking its economic performance when on matters like the cost-of-living and inflation Malta is found at the bottom of the EU league table.

I believe that the PN's greatest mistake in this regard was to allow one of its candidates to run the campaign.

Apart from the fact that this was totally unfair to both the other candidates and the party itself, the PN's decision backfired because in allowing Simon Busuttil and his cronies to run this campaign the PN effectively let the election be run by a bunch of Brussels-based groupies who are completely cut off from the reality which the vast majority of Maltese and Gozitan people live day-in-day-out.

This rule also applies to the result of the Local Council elections. Here, while Labour won a 54% majority overall, the truth of the matter is that the electorate voted for the councils and councilors, especially mayors, who performed best. In this case, as I have told many fellow pundits in conversations and evaluations at the counting hall in Naxxar, the truth of the situation is that the Local Council elections are local-local elections.

Thus, while Labour retained the control of councils like Rabat and Msida which it only won from the PN in recent elections from 2003 onwards, Labour lost control of councils like Pieta` and San Gwann which fall in the same category but where it simply did not perform to people's expectations. In this context, Joseph Muscat was very wise and very brave not only in admitting defeat in these particular localities but also in saying that no excuses should be made but rather lessons drawn from such experiences of non-performance.

So, in conclusion, this was overall a damn good result for Labour but one which does not, as the saying goes, give Labour the comfort to rest on its laurels.