Joseph Muscat may not know when Columbus discovered America. One thing he does know, however, is how to win an election.

The upshot is that Totò and teargas can no longer effectively be used to underwrite campaigns

What happened a week ago was a reminder that democratic politics is not about erudition or rhetorical homages to immutable values. Rather, it’s about representation. It turns out that by far the best representation of contemporary Maltese society and its aspirations is Muscat’s Labour Party.

Last Sunday’s result was not a simple quantitative victory. The numbers are so huge that I honestly think we’re looking at a set of important qualitative changes.

Certainly Sunday’s result signalled the end of the post-1977 Nationalist Party hegemony. It was never a total hegemony truth be told, in that the PN never managed to make significant inroads into the Labourite share of a certain type of socio-educational background (blue-collar and such).

But when it came to a rather different class and its ever-swelling flanks of upward mobility and aspiration, the PN ruled the roost for over 30 years.

You could meet 10 people in an average morning at University and eight of them would be Nationalist sympathisers and/or voters.

At the risk of over-egging the pudding, I think that has now changed. If the numbers are anything to go by, it would appear that it is now possible for someone who is not Alfred Sant to have a Ph.D and be openly Labour.

Partly the reason is that a good half of those eight would in the longer term have come from Labour backgrounds. What kept them talking, acting, and voting Nationalist was the fact that the PN was quite simply the party that kept you looking at the stars, whether or not you were actually in the gutter. Muscat has managed to turn nine parliamentary seats’ worth of that gaze to his dividend.

It would of course be daft to put it down to just that. Muscat also played the sectoral card rather well.

Muslims, the gay lobby (a term I hate but there we go) and hunters were among the many groups feeding out of his hand by the end of the campaign.

I don’t think that’s necessarily a devious strategy. Take hunters. The PN’s position was that we would be voting, as the ad put it, “with 10,000 guns to our head”.

In other words, the party got all sanctimonious about blackmail. Only it is in fact quite alright for a political party to choose to represent the interests of particular groups.

The snag is, of course, that such focused representations tend to metamorphose into conflicts and contestations once that party is in power. That’s especially true if the party aspires to be, well, a movement (rather than a minority interest). Labour may or may not be a movement but with 12 percentage points to its advantage, it is certainly no minority interest.

Indeed, one is tempted to draw an analogy of sorts with the world order post-1990, when two superpowers became one. Pity Austin Gatt isn’t in Muscat’s parliamentary group. His comments about majorities and bulldozers would, I’m sure, make for some epic entertainment.

This brings me to the PN and to my hunch that it’s probably not quite the mess it appears to be. It would be, had it passed on a broken government and country.

That would mean a project of rebuilding which would put the party out of synch with whatever new structures happen to emerge.

What we have instead is a plan for renovation at best. The PN will find the new Malta fairly easy to navigate, simply because it will not be so new after all. One might even argue the plans will be the same, only under a new project management.

Still, the party has a number of problems on its hands. It will have to deal with the fact that unless Muscat keeps his finger on the self-destruct button until he’s blue in the face, chances are it will lose the next election. Maltese politics has seen some impressive sea changes to be sure, but 35,000 votes is a lot by any standards. Among other difficulties, it can be very hard to keep supporters’ spirits high under such circumstances.

It’s also likely the knives will soon be out. Franco Debono seems too taken doing his Tal-Ajkla bit in the Għaxaq square these days, but his talk of oligarchies and cliques may well come back to haunt the PN. Lawrence Gonzi, Austin Gatt and Paul Borg Olivier are safely out of the way, but the blood will have to come from somewhere.

Another thing is, the 1980s are dead and gone as far as political capital is concerned. Not that there ever was a convergence of narrative – thus Nationalists will talk of Tal-Barrani for example as an attack by State-sponsored thugs, Labourites as an act of provocation. But many people who remember that time had a gut-felt fear of Labour. That fear was both nourished and milked by the Nationalist Party to significant effect.

Now it seems, the ghosts of the 1980s have been all but exorcised. It was part strategy (Muscat’s apologies, his experiments with colour, and so on), part social amnesia (people who are younger than 40 or so have no lived memories of the period), and part actual experience (the Labour threat was shown the door by Sant and hasn’t been back since).

The upshot is that Totò and teargas can no longer effectively be used to underwrite campaigns.

Forget the boring red-and-white national faces. March 2013 is an exhilarating time to be a Labourite, a highly exciting one to be a Nationalist.

mafalzon@hotmail.com