Many of us remember that moment, during the general election campaign, when, during a rapid fire round of yes/no questions, Lawrence Gonzi was asked whether he thought ‘the people’ had been right to vote for divorce. Gonzi, who had, after all, voted against the divorce Bill in Parliament (after ascertaining it would pass), replied “Yes.”

There are two kinds of truth in politics

The online reaction naturally included those who demanded why, in that case, he had acted the way he did, even after the referendum.

But, apart from those who complained why he hadn’t said yes earlier, there were also those who complained about why he had said yes now. He was accused of insincerity.

While it’s true that the online reaction after a leaders’ debate is itself a factory of insincerity, my hunch is that in this case the reactions did represent a wide spectrum of real opinion.

One might argue that Gonzi was damned if he did, damned if he didn’t. It was a trick question, wasn’t it? Had he replied that no, he thought the majority was wrong, he’d have been accused of arrogance.

Who did he think he was to say the majority was wrong?

For those of you who are curious, the right answer was actually the third option.

Bend the yes/no rule (which Joseph Muscat was permitted) and play the lofty servant’s card: “It’s not for politicians to judge voters’ decisions. It’s for voters to judge the politicians.”

OK, so tactically Gonzi should have played Jeeves, dressing down his questioner while acting as democracy’s valet.

But where does that leave the question itself? Have we really reached the stage where we cannot tell who’s right? Or that it’s undemocratic to claim the majority is mistaken?

The issue is no mere campaign footnote. It has survived the general election. It cropped up again earlier this month for Gonzi’s successor, Simon Busuttil, who told his party councillors that a majority of 36,000 votes “cannot be wrong”.

He’s been pounced on from two sides.

On the one hand, the predictable jeers that the majority cannot be wrong when he leads the Opposition’s criticism.

On the other, there’s been the offence taken by people who voted for the Nationalist Party at the general election and who took the comment to mean that, somehow, their vote has been found wanting. They’ve also raised the obvious argument: there are plenty of handy historical examples where majorities have been dreadfully wrong.

The problem with both arguments is that there are two kinds of truth in politics.

The question Gonzi faced was tricky because it mixed them up. And Busuttil elicited the kind of reaction he did because he wasn’t careful enough, in his unscripted speech, to distinguish between them.

Neither governments nor markets are, properly speaking, “objective” the way science is. Governments and markets involve behaviour that’s subjective. However, they do have mechanisms and systems that work independently of our wishes. Therefore, we can conveniently speak of objective political-economic truths.

It’s not a 36,000-vote majority, nor even a 100,000-vote majority, that decides whether the PN was wrong to say that Labour’s energy proposal isn’t feasible within the terms of market economics and democratic accountability.

If the proposal is implemented without incurring public debt or democratic damage, then it would mean Labour was right, even if its popular support is decimated. But if Labour slashes utility prices only by jeopardising the long-term health of our political and economic institutions, then even a bigger landslide in 2018 wouldn’t stop the PN from having been proved right.

The other kind of political truth is public perception, which has a bad name, since it can be fuelled by spin, myth and ignorance. When objective political truth clashes with perception, it’s the latter that’s wrong. But in some cases perception is the only truth there is.

If nine out of 10 people in a room think I’m insufferable, then I must be. Because what it means to be insufferable is that other people find me hard to stomach. It’s their stomach and they’re the best judge. If it was a matter of one or two people, I could blame the other. But nine out of 10 cannot be wrong.

When Busuttil said a 36,000-vote majority “cannot be wrong”, he was referring to public perception. He had already lauded Gonzi as a statesman and praised his record – leaving no doubt about his take on the objective truth.

But he was pointing out that when you’re on the wrong end of a landslide, that’s not just an expression of preference.

It’s a strong statement of public perception – in this case, of being out of touch. On such a scale, it cannot just be dismissed. It needs to be addressed.

Busuttil is right to address the issue as quickly as possible to put it out of play.

Given Labour’s ambitions to redraw Malta anew, the main political tussle in this legislature is going to be about objective truth – about whether our political-economic institutions end up getting stronger or weaker.

That’s a difficult argument to conduct since it can be abstract and at odds with perception. Persuasion, in practice, depends on people perceiving you to be enough in touch with their aspirations to trust your opinion on what’s best for the kind of life they want to live.

By the way, that’s an objective truth about how our politics work. So, while he should have said it more clearly, Busuttil was right. Even if all of you think he was wrong.

ranierfsadni@europe.com