The other week I had a conversation with a keen Nationalist Party supporter. Usually a jovial chap, he was in the doldrums because he had met so many people who had voted PN last March and who were applauding the Prime Minister for his so-called stand on migration – his threatening an illegal pushback.
Sometime later, I met an academic who is well known for his leftwing political views. He was telling me how disappointed he was with – you guessed it – the Prime Minister’s threatening an illegal pushback of migrants.
I need not point out where I stand on this issue. I have always said we needed some moral leadership to combat the racism that is evident among the Maltese people and that only the previous Prime Minister was saying the right things about this issue.
But this is not my point today. Every day I meet established Nationalist voters who openly agree with some decision taken by Joseph Muscat, and established Labour voters who openly disagree. I see a trend in this.
Loyal Nationalist voters have been caught unawares by the Auditor General’s damning reports on what was going on in Wasteserv and Enemalta’s purchase of fuel between 2008 and 2011. They genuinely believed the previous administration was more serious and responsible than these two issues lead one to believe.
Slowly, they are now grappling with so many thorny questions and realising what other PN voters perceived before the election when they abstained or switched to the other side. Blind trust is no longer on the agenda.
Meanwhile, those who have been dubbed ‘switchers’ say ‘I told you so’, while having to face the accusation that they voted for methods they disapprove of and decisions with which disagree. Among these there are also those who feel they have to justify their position, as if whatever is done by the present administration is a direct consequence of their decision.
The argument that once you voted one way, you have to accept that you have swallowed the bait, hook, line and sinker and you are hooked for life is sounding more and more spurious.
Saying that the previous administration tackled certain issues in a completely wrong manner and expressing this disagreement openly is not tantamount to agreeing with whatever Muscat is now dishing out, as some are now attempting to make it out. This argument holds water only in a black-or-white scenario when, in truth, politics has much more than 50 shades of grey.
It seems we have finally broken the mould. The two different opposing tribes with each believing that whatever ‘we’ do must be right and whatever ‘they’ do must be wrong, seems to be part of a receding scenario.
In normal democracies, shifts in support for different political parties are occurring all the time between one election and another.
The news on the political front in the UK last week was that the Conservatives have drawn level with Labour in the polls for the first time in more than a year. As a result of a drop in the support for the UK Independence Party (UKIP), the Conservatives have enjoyed a seven-point surge to put them on 36 per cent, equal to the support enjoyed by the opposition Labour Party. Meanwhile, UKIP’s decline meant that the Liberal Democrats regained the third slot.
I have always said that we needed some moral leadership to combat the racism that is evident among the Maltese people
Such huge shifts in support were unknown in Malta before the result of the March election put paid to the myth that our two main political parties were permanently within a hair breadth of each other. It is now evident that the conventional wisdom of the past no longer holds, and frequent massive shifts in voter preference are not impossible. It all depends on the way the two parties are perceived to behave rather than on the prejudiced view that a party must be right because it runs ‘in the veins’ of whoever is assessing it.
There is, of course, only one poll that counts: the election itself. We have been used for so many years to only very slight shifts in party support between one election and another. This is no longer so, and we are unwittingly observing the end of the world as we know it.
Four months since the election, one can sense even more recent substantial shifts in party support. And these shifts have not been one way. This sounds extraordinary in the Maltese political scenario, but it is all too real.
I guess Malta is slowly blossoming into a modern European democracy, with many discarding the prejudice of the past and judging politicians on what they say and what they do, rather than on the badge adjacent to their name on the ballot paper.
As for racism, unfortunately this phenomenon raises its ugly head in other European democracies as well, as is evident by the presence of right-wing parties. These tend to increase their level of popular support by taking advantage of the failures and disappointing performances of the mainstream parties.
‘Yes, but not in Malta’ is no longer a sensible riposte.
micfal@maltanet.net