It has been said that truth is the first casualty of war. Whether the term ‘war’ includes electoral campaigns is a moot point, but there is no doubt that truth is always a casualty of electoral campaigns.
This time around, Labour seems to have an adviser with a sense of humour- Michael Falzon
In the run-up to the US presidential election, Time magazine carried out an interesting exercise to check which of the two electoral campaigns is the more dishonest. They asked each camp for a list of its rival’s worst deceptions. After checking the claims independently, Time published a selected list of the 10 ‘most prominent falsehoods and prevarications’ of each campaign.
The contents of the lists are, to say the least, intriguing. Some are plain falsehoods; others are distortions of the truth or misleading allegations. For example, the Obama camp claims that under the current incumbent, the use of renewable energy in the US has doubled when it has only increased by about 25 per cent, while the Romney camp insists on falsely referring to Obama’s reform on medical care as a ‘trillion-dollar federal takeover of the US healthcare system’, a blatant untruth that is even further spiced up by being described as a disaster.
According to Time, “the Romney operation’s misstatements are frequently more brazen” but “the most effective lie is the one that is closest to the truth, and Obama’s team has often outdone Romney’s in the dark art of subtle distortion”.
Compare this to what is happening in the Maltese electoral campaign that has been going on for some time, even though it has not yet officially started. Although we technically vote to elect MPs, our political campaigns are focused on the candidate for Prime Minister – the so-called presidential style just like campaigns where presidents are directly elected by voters such as in France and the US. Whatever the case, even in Malta, truth is at a premium during electoral campaigns.
At the present stage when the campaign is still in the embryo stage, negative campaigning takes precedence over positive campaigning. As is expected, the dose of negative attributes banded about against the adversary is high.
Electoral campaigns are a form of psychological warfare and it has been found that the best way forward is first to imbue the electorate with negative sentiments about the adversaries by denigrating their intentions and actions and then, when the election date nears – and only then – start promising the goodies to replace the by now entrenched negative sentiment with the ‘feel good factor’ of a different way of doing things.
This ‘relief’ of knowing that all those bad things can be avoided or replaced with the promise of a new dawn will nudge those – who are willing to be nudged – towards voting for whoever is being pushed by the campaign.
Yet, even negative campaigning can boomerang. Compare the subtle spin made by the PN in the 2008 election campaign regarding Alfred Sant’s proposal for an increase in the primary school years with the current PN’s shameless spin of Joseph Muscat’s position on the minimum wage.
The first was very close to the truth with the added year being described as a ‘repeater class’, provoking an indignant reaction from parents who never want their children to be ‘repeaters’. The second is so much far away from the truth that the falsehood can be easily perceived. The first spin was a winner, while the second one is simply a PR disaster.
Another interesting aspect in electoral campaigns is the use of a sense of humour which is not to be confused with outright ridicule.
Contrary to what used to happen in the past, this time around, Labour seems to have an adviser with a sense of humour – the billboards in reaction to the queue in the PN’s ‘Labour won’t work’ message and to the ‘My choice’ billboard were a breath of fresh air in the permanently stagnant electoral tug-of-war. But even here things can go overboard. Somehow plagiarising an overused stupid T-shirt message by putting up a billboard saying that ‘Austin went to London and all he got us was a lousy bendy-bus’ is outright silly.
What is obviously lacking in both the PN and Labour campaigns is what the two parties intend to deliver to the electorate if they are elected – except for Labour’s vague promise to lower electricity tariffs.
Is the PN just promising more of the same? Is Labour promising the opposite of what Labour used to deliver as the state-control freak that it used to be in the Mintoff days? Who knows?
However, the time will soon come when the two electoral campaigns will have to switch to positive mode; when ‘How good we will be’ becomes more important than ‘How bad the others are’.
As it is, many undecided and would-be abstainers already know why they don’t feel like voting for any one of the two parties. Will some positive campaigning persuade them to decide otherwise, one way or the other?
This depends on how much truth can be discerned in the positive messages that are yet to come.
micfal@maltanet.net