Now that the sex, drugs, and mudslinging aspect of the electoral campaign have been largely exhausted, the focus has switched to testimonials. The PN and the PL seem to have run out of secret recordings about drugs and ladies of the night in their respective clubs and have finally gotten around to telling us why we should vote for them.

Muscat wants us to believe that JPO’s retention is in recognition of the sterling service he carries out

Lawrence Gonzi is basing his last pleas to the electorate on a promise of more of the same – a sort of ‘steady as she goes’ course. Joseph Muscat’s legion of shiny, happy people encourage us to join a national movement where all are ‘in’, where appointments are made solely on the basis of meritocracy and where we will have a transparent government.

One of Labour’s campaign videos, entitled Courage to Vote features a young girl purporting to come from a staunch Nationalist family, urging her parents to buck tradition and have the courage to vote Labour for the first time. It’s quite clear that the cohort being targeted is that of people whose background is deep blue and who are now disenchanted with the Gonzi government.

Basically it’s intended to appeal to people like me – someone who for many years supported and voted for the PN. But if Labour thinks that the real leap of courage is that of voting for Labour, they’re mistaken. Because the real act of courage would be voting for Alternattiva Demokrattika – the only party to have conducted an electoral campaign shorn of hype and populist gimmicks.

While both the PN and the PL claim they are for economically sustainable policies and fiscal prudence, they are both promising post-electoral goody bags which will burn a whopping huge hole in the nation’s pocket. What with tablets for everyone over the age of two, funded holidays for 18-year-olds, a decrease in taxes and what not, Gonzi and Muscat are as credible and responsible as Silvio Berlusconi promising to refund millions of euros to gullible voters (and look where that got the Italians).

I have my doubts about the pseudo-costings of these rash campaign promises. In the cold, hard light of the post-electoral day, after all the car-cading and the euphoria of victory, whoever is in government will face a choice as to whether to keep their promises and to lead us to bankruptcy, or to simply forget all about them.

There’s another thing that really irritates me about both the Nationalist and the Labour campaigns. The country is going through its version of Tangentopoli with the commissions-for-oil scandal. People who are allegedly involved in the whole sordid kickback business are being arraigned practically every other day. The whole affair stinks of corruption at worst or gross negligence and a completely unregulated procurement system at best.

The situation may have been prevented had a culture of transparency been encouraged and whistleblower legislation enacted. These measures weren’t taken. We have ministers like Tonio Fenech who regard accepting freebie flights as a minor slip-up and not a breach of ministerial ethics, and a Prime Minister who doesn’t consider this as a resignable offence.

And both the PL and the PN delight in this childish point-scoring, rubbing their hands in glee when the people arraigned in the scandal hail from the opposing political camp.

I am fed up with hearing grand speeches about transparency when neither the PN nor Labour has told us who is funding them. The Prime Minister would have us believe that the PN’s loan from Nazzareno Vassallo is par for the course, but as Mandy Rice Davies said when Lord Astor denied having an affair with her, “Well he would say that wouldn’t he?”

I just can’t believe the Labour hype about meritocratic appoint­­ments, when we’ve just heard Muscat pledge to retain Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando as chairman of the Malta Council for Science and Technology if Labour is elected to government.

Five years ago, Pullicino Orlando lead the country a merry dance, not exactly being forthcoming about his interest in a planning application in the ecologically-sensitive Mistra zone.

He was the 2008 carnival act, getting Nationalist spinners to ghostwrite his articles, popping up all over the place playing the part of the innocent victim of Alfred Sant’s mudslinging, when he was anything but a victim. Then, instead of lying low and being thankful he had not been booted out, he spent a good part of these past five years in renegade MP mode.

And now Muscat wants us to believe that Pullicino Orlando’s retention is in recognition of the sterling service he carries out as a lucratively-paid chairman, and not payback for the grief he gave Gonzi. Let’s just say it won’t wash, and that with this move Muscat has already damaged his own credibility.

Those are just some of the reasons why I wouldn’t consider giving either the PN or the PL my vote. I will vote for AD – the only party which has consistently taken a firm and sensible stand on issues ranging from party financing to squatting on public land and to illegal use of groundwater.

I will be voting for a party which doesn’t waffle about issues and suddenly evince an interest in specific causes on the eve of the election. I will ignore the usual scaremongerers, describing doomsday scenarios of unstable coalition governments and economic meltdown.

The recessions which many EU countries are facing is not attributable to coalition governments but to endemic corruption and cronyism – not entirely alien factors to us.

I will laugh off all the bleating about wasted votes. Because a vote is only wasted when you vote for a party you do not support to keep out a party you despise more. Voting for the lesser of two evils is not an act of courage. Voting for AD is.

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt