Last Saturday, voters sent a very clear message to the government and to the party in government. Actually, it was more than a message. It was an ultimatum. We either get it right. Or we get out.

... what is clear is that people have become increasingly alienated from the PN- Simon Busuttil

It was as stark as that.

There is no other way of interpreting a staggering 56 per cent majority that voted for the Labour Party against less than 42 per cent for the Nationalist Party.

Any honest reflection of this result must ponder on two questions.

The first is why did we get this result and the second is what can we do to reverse it? Let’s start with the first.

There are always 101 different reasons why people vote one way and not another or why they choose to vote with their feet and stay at home. But what is clear is that people have become increasingly alienated from the PN. And trust has been eroded.

Now it is generally acknowledged – even by our harshest critics – that the PN government has more or less implemented the right policies over the past four years. And that it did so despite a very inclement world economic climate.

So it is evident that what went wrong was not the government’s policies in as much as it was its inability to communicate its policies to the people. To explain to them and to listen to them. It might not sound like a substantive reason for losing support. But it is. Very much so. For unless it communicates well, a governing party will find itself looking disconnected, insensitive or, worse, arrogant.

And, yes, we have already been here before and we have heard this all before. But we have done little about it.

So we are now left with a very limited window of opportunity to redress this communications deficit and to regain people’s trust. It is a small window. And unless we jump through it, we are in for a certain electoral defeat.

The second question is how to reverse last Saturday’s result.

Well, the Prime Minister was clearly pre-empting this question when, two weeks ago, he announced two concrete initiatives to redress this communications deficit.

In the first, he asked me to coordinate for him a structured dialogue with civil society and social partners. In the second, he asked the PN’s secretary general, Paul Borg Olivier, to get ministers, MPs and PN candidates out on the field in a coordinated manner to meet more and more people in their homes and in the streets.

As for my part, over the past two weeks, I have been working on the groundwork to embark on a wide structured dialogue. I can now announce that the Prime Minister and I will embark on this exercise in the coming days.

I have to say that the response that I received has been truly overwhelming. I have been completely inundated with requests for meetings and for assistance by hundreds of people, groups of people and associations. It is a daunting task to reply to everyone and to meet everyone in the shortest possible time but I will do my best within my constraints.

If anything, last Saturday’s result has increased my determination to deliver on this. And the upside is that people actually want to give us a chance and meet us. That is very positive indeed.

But it is probably the last chance that they will give us. And this is how I interpret the fact that, rather than vote for Labour last Saturday, thousands of people preferred to stay at home, taking voter turnout down to an all-time record. They were telling us that they want us to get things right before it is too late. And that if we do not, then we are heading for a certain electoral defeat in a few months’ time.

Which leaves just one point: Is it already too late? Perhaps, but perhaps not.

Twelve months – if the electoral mandate is respected to the end – is not a short time and we can do a lot to redress the situation. This will depend on whether we can deliver on the Prime Minister’s commitment to put the people back at the heart of our politics and to take our party back to the people.

It will depend on whether everyone, ministers included, will do their part to get this done. I am sure that they will.

It will depend on whether we can shed our recent image of a party that is more concerned with its internal problems than with serving the people.

But, most importantly, it will depend on whether we can reconnect with the people whose trust we have lost. For we must regain people’s trust. Otherwise we are doomed.

simon.busuttil@europarl.europa.eu

Dr Busuttil is a Nationalist member of the European Parliament.