ON THE CUSP

As you read this, recovering, like me from the excess of Christianity most of us who profess that faith, and many of us who do not, demonstrate at this time of the year, you will probably not have reflected on the fact that we are on the cusp of (yet another) election campaign.

I’m not talking about the Local Council elections – this time around, these will interest me not’ardly, because if my locality is going to the polls, I’m not going to vote. I don’t bother voting to elect members in an institution that doesn’t bother to do anything in my area while being only interested in fining me for parking in a manner that does not please the institution while doing nothing about the parking problem in my area. None of the vehicles my family runs has ever, to my knowledge, obstructed the free flow of traffic or pedestrians, yet we get done for a ticket or two every week. Fair enough, the (few) places we can park are clearly marked but the idiotic measures the two neighbouring councils have taken have cut down on the available spaces and nothing has been done to sort the problem.

In fact, pretty much nothing has been done in our bit of the locality, so it’s time for a spot of a plague on both your houses – in fact, on both the houses in both the localities that affect me.

So the election campaign about which I write is the one where we will be asked to elect MEPs – whether this will be a punishment or not is, Boring Europolis being what is, debatable, but let’s assume the people contesting actually want the job, for the purposes of this discussion.

As ever, before you cast your vote, you take a primary decision – are you going blue, red (are they still red?) or green? I’m taking it that you are an intelligent, discerning type, since you are reading this, so the notion of wasting your vote by casting it for Lowell (are convicted criminals allowed to contest MEP elections?) or that Muscat bloke (and I don’t mean Joe, but Josie) will not have crossed your mind.

The received wisdom is that the PN will again suffer at the hands of the PL (MLP as was) which is hardly an earth-shattering notion. A government at the beginning of its term, doing what it can get away with in the popularity stakes before having to start thinking about the next General Elections, is hardly likely to gain in popularity, and the current economic disaster, while not being the fault of Gonzi and his lads (though to read Orizzont or Kull Torca, you’d think it was) sure ain’t about to give them a fillip.

This having been said, the received wisdom before the last General Elections was that the PN would get whupped and that proved to be a load of bunkum. Of course, had that Sant fellow not timed the JPO story so badly, it might have proved to be true that the MLP would get in, reversing the reverse in the polls that the PN’s masterly campaign had pulled off, but the fact remains that even after 20-odd years in Government, the PN still got the nod, slight as it was.

This does not mean, however, that realistically there’ll be a reverse of the previous MEP result of 3 – 2, though stranger things have happened at sea, of course.

As in the Local Council elections, the populace at large doesn’t give as much importance to the MEP elections as it does to the General Elections. People who have quite cheerfully not bothered to turn up or who have experimented with going red or green have made it pretty darn clear, when the important poll comes around, that they would prefer their writing hand to wither away, just to be Biblical about it, rather than have it scribble in any way that would raise the spectre of Labour getting into power.

So it’s not really likely that the PN will reverse the third Labour (just can’t call them PL, it doesn’t roll off the keyboard) seat – to be honest, there are those who think, generally because they can’t read the numbers, that the Greens are threatening the PN’s second seat, leaving the most hardworking Maltese MEP as the only representative of his party, ironically.

Let’s just put that one to bed once and for all, shall we? The Greens, with their calculated grab for some sort of power, vestigial though it would have been had it worked, at the General Elections, have hardly enamoured themselves to an electorate that remains, pretty much, split down the middle between the two parties. Last time around, in the MEP poll, they rode on the pro-Europe, simpatico wave that their manner of conducting themselves had engendered. This time around, plenty of water has flowed under the bridge, and while plenty of their guys remain simpatici, more than a touch of real-politik has crept into the equation, leaving them out in the cold reality of finger pointing and acrimony.

So the smart money, assuming you can find anyone to take it, will be on PN 2 – Labour 3, which will give Joe Muscat’s boys and girls something to crow about but which will be relatively unimportant in the greater scheme of things.

As to who will be voted for within the party lists, working out that will be an interesting exercise to which space will be dedicated when the picture is clearer.