An old Westminster joke describes a young MP sneaking out of his first parliamentary group meeting to take his place on the back benches of the House.

A veteran MP followed this young man, placed a fatherly hand on the young man's shoulder, and asked him what he was doing. The excited freshman replied: "I can't wait for my first glimpse of the enemy."

The elder statesman shook his head and said "Those, my boy, are your political opponents. Your enemies are all on this side of the House."

Sarcasm knows no bounds, but maybe things have not gone so far in our House of Representatives. One could not say the same about the rivalry among electoral candidates within each political party, as they jostle for survival under the proportional representation (PR) system.

Whether a candidate is seeking the pole position in the constituency line-up, or is merely aspiring to a modest marginal success, no quarter is expected or given, particularly when candidates smell the aroma of an approaching election.

The ranks close after every electoral contest, by which time long-lasting damage to personal relations might have been inflicted and embedded in the memory of hard-nosed career politicians. Whether this is good for democracy or for the country is another matter.

PR, combined with the system of preference votes, opens the way for many permutations. It makes it possible for the different party machines to experiment in 'electoral engineering', for individual candidates to conjure mutually-beneficial formulas.

It is true that it is the individual elector who holds the trump card and decides what to do with his vote. But the extent to which these permutations gain circulation and a mass electoral support nullifies the democratic process in that they introduce a 'bloc-vote'.

The manipulation of this kind of bloc-vote plays havoc with the genuine democratic process, which presumes that the one-man-one-vote system represents the collective opinion of free citizens voting according to their 'conscience', in secrecy and in tranquility, without outside pressure or influence on the part of sources with ulterior or even hidden motives.

This need for a politically-enlightened electorate, with a stake in cultivating grassroot democracy, is important. Individual electors must be made fully aware of the importance of their vote, and of ensuring that this vote is an expression of their convictions and of their personal opinion. Mature electors will not allow themselves to be manipulated.

The next elections will put the electorate to the test. For one thing, the difference between the main party programmes has dwindled, in view of the fact that they are making a bid for the middle ground.

When it comes to strengthening our democracy, the main parties often speak the same language, albeit with their respective nuances. They are equally eloquent, on paper, in challenging abuses of concentrated power. Raising expectation levels to get the main parties moving away from a competition between the 'bad versus the worse' towards the 'good versus the better', requires a civic dynamic that is incompatible with the status quo.

The initiative must come from the so-called floating vote - which consists of voters who think with their own minds, and who do not rely on the party machines for their motivation.

The future of Maltese democracy will depend on whether or not enough self-reliant citizens at the grassroots show their muscle.

There is a danger that electors may lower their expectations about what politics can mean to the nation's future, that they settle for diminishing returns.

Politics is corrupted not just by money, but by being trivialised out of addressing the great enduring issues of who controls, who decides, who owns, who pays, and why solutions on the shelf are not applied to the existing and looming crises in our society.

Mature electors must resist the entreaties of the remnants of the old order, whose track record is out of tune with their modern siren songs, with the same resolve that they are expected to show in curbing the excesses of monied interests.

They have it in their power to clean the particular stable to which they belong and to bring new faces and a new breeze, that will give this young republic a new lease of life.

What Malta needs with increasing urgency is a new breed of politicians who appeal, not to electoral fears, but to electoral hopes and aspirations.

jgv@onvol.net