It’s rather laughable that Malta’s politicians and their acolytes get excited about winning seats on councils in certain villages that have more livestock than people, but that’s a reality we’ve faced ever since a misguided decision was taken to create so many little empires.
This island is not even 30km long, yet Malta and Gozo have 68 local councils when a handful of regional councils would plainly make more sense. So every few years or so we have to suffer a re-enactment of a general election scene at the counting hall as numerous candidates take their place with promises to change the world – or at least the tiny part of it in which they live.
Interest among the electorate in this state of affairs has, understandably, been on the wane – but the relatively high turnout for this year’s round bucks what had become a steady downward trend.
However, the answer doesn’t lie in residents becoming keener to have Johnny or Janey fixing a pothole here and there, or building a little garden outside their home.
It’s down to two factors that have very little to do with local councils.
The first is the spring hunting referendum. Rather than the local elections providing a spur for people to go out and vote for or against the killing of migrating birds, it proved to be the other way round.
There is little doubt that the turnout would have been considerably lower had it not been for the referendum – which, for diametrically opposed reasons, helped both Labour and the Nationalists to get out the vote.
The second major factor in this round of local elections was the state of the Nationalist Party. The future of the PN, which for years had been the natural party of government, not to mention its leader, who had struggled to make an impact where it counts, would have been seriously called into question if the party failed to take any chunks out of Labour in terms of the overall national vote.
Simon Busuttil certainly wasn’t taking any chances. He took a very pragmatic decision not to turn the spring hunting referendum into a divisive political issue by taking a similar stand to the Prime Minister, and kept an eerily low profile during the local councils’ electoral campaign.
From a strictly numbers point of view (as opposed to more lasting damage caused by seeming to appease the hunting lobby), his approach seemed to pay off as the Nationalists made inroads into the huge majority achieved by Labour during the same round of elections in 2012, narrowing the gap by almost half.
As is his wont, Joseph Muscat attempted to deal with this rather flippantly, by saying that “if he is happy, then I am happy”, while the Labour Party machine went into full propaganda mode to trumpet another “landslide” victory at the polls.
But, whether this result has any bearing on the next general election or not – it is extremely difficult to see how Labour can lose a 37,000 majority in three years’ time – it is the first time since 2013 that the Nationalist Party has had something to smile about.
Whether it means the PN is “back in business” as Dr Busuttil has said, or whether it shows that Dr Muscat is “no longer invincible”, remains to be seen. The party still has a huge mountain to climb and a lot of changing to do on the inside and outside to win back voter confidence.
However, if Labour refuses to see the signs that have appeared in the referendum and the local council elections, that job is going to become a little easier.