Nine months after its resounding success at the polls, the Labour Party in government has received a reality check that should make it stand up and listen.
The sharp decline in trust in the government, just revealed in a Eurobarometer survey, may have come as a shock to it but not to those who have been watching the government take some wrong turns.
Maybe the government thought it could get away with it, considering the size of its parliamentary majority, but people are not politically naive.
Just six months on from the last survey, trust in government has fallen from 59 per cent to 48 per cent, which is quite significant in such a short period since the election.
Declines in trust of politicians and of political parties generally are not surprising, confirming trends in other countries. What is particularly worrying in Malta’s case, however, is the drop in trust in parliament, which has traditionally enjoyed high national respect, except for a period in the time of the Mintoff administration when high political tension often characterised parliamentary business.
People form their opinions of parliament from the debates. Individual actions seen to have gone against the grain, or taken out of purely personal interest or ambitions, as shown by prime examples of this towards the end of the last legislature, have no doubt contributed significantly to the decline in trust in parliament.
Not that Malta is an exception in this. According to the survey, the proportion who tend not to trust national governments and national parliaments has increased, while, in contrast, the number of respondents who do not trust the European Union has fallen.
Also sharply down in trust are the political parties. The print media ought to take a look at itself too as the degree of trust in it is not exactly something to be proud of.
The Eurobarometer survey is quite exhaustive. Taking a general view, some of the findings can be described as quite favourable. For example, Malta is one of the few countries where the people are expecting the economy to show better results than last year. This appears to confirm the general sentiment, including that expressed by the government in the budget for this year.
Quite interesting too is that 75 per cent described their household’s financial situation last year as good and that 30 per cent are expecting it to be even better. Many other findings deserve to be analysed separately on their own. An intriguing one is that, while 74 per cent feel “they are citizens of the EU”, only 46 per cent know their rights, a rate that falls far behind that of many other countries.
However, while the various findings in the survey provide much food for thought and should lead to greater action being taken in matters that really matter, it is politics that often dominate discussion. The truth is, however, that people are becoming increasingly weary of all the politicking that goes on in the country, something the politicians appear to constantly ignore.
People definitely want to see their representatives show greater accountability and higher political and ethical standards all round all the time.
The plan for the enactment of a law for the appointment of a commissioner for standards, ethics and proper behaviour for people in public life could go a long way towards improving people’s trust in politicians and in parliament.