So the “ex-Super One reporter and the man whose sole objective is to become Malta’s youngest Prime Minister”, according to ex-Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi, has won the general election and will be Malta’s next Prime Minister.
The Labour Party is not inheriting a shambles of a country
The majority of the Maltese people thankfully were not willing to buy into the Nationalist Party’s scaremongering campaign of après moi, le déluge.
Many will be feeling that the end of the world is nigh and that they have suffered an unmitigated personal loss. A couple of heart attacks cannot be excluded, seeing that cardiologist Mark Sammut and other researchers found that heart attacks were significantly higher in the weeks before and after an election, while deaths from coronary heart disease practically doubled the week after the result was out.
Whether there will be an equal number of heart attacks among those who will be celebrating as if an epochal change has occurred is a mute matter. Psephological analysis by both parties will eventually reveal what were the main drivers for the electorate’s decision.
Was it a mere yearning for change or was it disgust at the sleaze? Was it because the majority thought the Labour Party was more convincing in its proposals or was it because they concluded that the PN was unrealistic in its promises? Or was it a combination of these and several other considerations? What can be said to have prevailed: the positive messages or was it the mud that flew pell-mell?
Detailed analysis of the results will, no doubt, also reveal how different sections of the electorate voted and whether it was the PL that won the election or the PN that lost it.
Most people, however, will be glad to be able to return to some kind of normality.
The PL had long been expected to win, and it did. Perhaps, a considerable section of the electorate also punished Lawrence Gonzi for inflicting on them an unnecessarily long campaign that only served to prolong the uncertainty that characterised the last year or so of his government.
The PN will now return to Opposition, where, no doubt, it will start reorganising itself and trying to make life as difficult as possible for the Labour Government. That is what happens in any democracy and anybody who is hoping that the wolf will sleep with the lamb had better think again. In fact, I rather think that that would be for the best. There’s nothing like a healthy Opposition to keep the Government on its toes.
The PL will now face the challenges of government. If it runs the government as well as it did its electoral campaign, that would be welcome. Of course, there’s a great divide between sitting on the Opposition benches and being responsible for the conduct of State affairs. Whatever the good intentions of any political party, once in government it will find that delivering on all its promises is not that easy and sometimes may well be nigh impossible. And that’s aside from all the unpredictable events that can throw a spanner in the best-laid plans.
The challenges are huge. The PL is not inheriting a shambles of a country. The outgoing PN government bequeaths a healthy employment situation, a declining fiscal deficit, an economy that has been growing at a better rate than most of its eurozone counterparts and an acceptable education system.
But the plus points are counterbalanced by minus ones, such as excessively high recurrent expenditure, high public debt and an economy that is vulnerable to external shocks not least because of structural imbalances within it.
The PL will have to hit the ground running. Like most governments elsewhere, it will probably have a short honeymoon period during which it can hone its project plan and launch some major policy planks. But, alas, it will be all too brief.
The major challenge, of course, will be to build a gas-powered electricity-generating plant in two years. The Prime Minister’s own credibility will be at stake. But, in my opinion, that is neither here nor there. Voters can be quite forgiving, as the 2008 election amply showed, provided that their overall judgment of a government’s record is positive.
Elections are not generally won or lost on a single issue.
Has the PL set itself impossibly ambitious targets?
Forget the nitty gritty of its electoral proposals. Let’s not miss the wood for the trees. If there is anything that, in my opinion, rang a strong bell with the electorate that was the promise to turn a new leaf in the way of conducting politics and government.
Together with the gas-powered power station, that is surely the biggest personal commitment made by Joseph Muscat. The voters will not easily forgive him if he fails to deliver.
I also hope that, much as governments had no option but to put good governance on the top of their agendas after the global financial crisis, the Labour Government will leave no stone unturned to make good governance a lynchpin of its policy in government and political affairs.
Muscat has promised that what he has described as “tribal politics” will end or, at least, not remain the order of the day. Whether he will find the cooperation of the PN on that is doubtful, as wounded animals are not known to be docile.
A lot depends on who will lead the PN, now that Gonzi has declared he will not run for leader again. Human nature being what it is, however, whoever is the PN’s leader will want to show the party faithful that he can stand up to Muscat.
On the other hand, a new leader may well realise that a continuation of tribal politics would set him on the wrong path.
I will not make any predictions. The PL deserves to have the chance of showing it can deliver. I am hopeful that it will.
In the meantime, having been exhausted by an interminable barrage, should I take Robert Frost’s advice that “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on” or should I instead go with Mark Twain’s “Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life”?