The sovereign people have delivered their verdict loudly and clearly. Joseph Muscat has played his cards well and managed to win another five-year mandate as Malta’s Prime Minister, with a similarly big majority as that with which Labour was elected in 2013.

This second consecutive heavy election defeat of the Nationalist Party, this time under Simon Busuttil as leader, deserves serious consideration. I am sure that a thoughtful analysis and thorough investigation of what led to this defeat will be carried out by the party in the coming months. Nevertheless, it is possible here to draw certain prima facie conclusions based on observable facts.

Many questions spring to mind.

What kept the people from moving away from Labour in the light of the unprecedented depths of corruption in which Malta has been plunged? Do the Maltese not wish to have a restoration of good governance? Has party loyalty prevailed over loyalty to the country? Has the government abused state power to influence the elections in favour of the party in power?

Have Busuttil and his party’s leadership failed to take due cognizance of the people’s true aspirations in the party’s electoral programme? Has the Nationalist Party embarked on certain candidates who do not aspire the people’s trust? Has the PN adopted a negative election campaign? Has the electorate fallen to the Labour Party’s propaganda that the country’s stability cannot be guaranteed by a coalition government between the PN and a second party?

There could not be the slightest doubt that the government has extensively used its power of incumbency to win votes for Labour. This has been manifested by the pre-election placement of a large number of new employees on the State payroll, the granting of indefinite contracts to many employees in the public sector and public entities and the signing of a public service workers collective agreement costing €17 million and which will increase to €20.5 million by 2024.

A manifest absurdity was the award of an estimated 600 promotions to army personnel just a month before elections, which number amounts to around half the entire army. Some of these promotions were backdated to 1996.

The election result also indicates that Maltese citizens in their majority give a greater importance to family income and other daily bread and butter issues and fail to adequately realise the harm that corruption actually does to the ordinary citizen and the country as a whole.

Had Malta been a country where its citizens truly live up to their role of preventing corruption, they would have taken advantage of the country’s democratic system and used the opportunity given to them by a general election to punish corrupt politicians and vote them out of office.

Instead, they massively voted for Konrad Mizzi, who, with the Prime Minister’s chief of staff Keith Schembri, has gone through a complicated bureaucratic process to set up secret offshore shell companies in Panama, in which both men planned to deposit close to $1 million annually, raised from consultancy and brokerage services.

Busuttil has based his electoral campaign on the cleaning up of the government of corruption and reforming governance. This made a lot of sense from the context of safeguarding the country’s good name. However, in so doing, he miscalculated the relatively low sensitivity of the average Maltese citizen to corruption.

Another miscalculation was that of accepting Salvu Mallia as a PN candidate and, worse still, giving the general impression that he was some sort of a star candidate by sending him to represent the party in television debates. Although there can be no doubt about Mallia’s genuineness, he was a source of continuous embarrassment to the party by his open and repeated failure to keep within the boundaries of acceptable behaviour as a party candidate.

Independently of the Labour Party’s huge general election victory, the corruption scandals that have affected Muscat’s previous administration will not vanish into thin air. The suspicions of kickbacks flagged by the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit (FIAU) in connection with the privatisation of State energy corporation Enemalta, will still be looked into.

The election result and the closeness that exists between Muscat and Schembri will also not stop the magisterial inquiries prompted by another two FIAU reports that are under way on alleged money laundering and graft by Schembri.

One of the inquiries concerns the alleged receipt of bribes from the sale of Maltese passports coming from the Prime Minister’s financial consultant and the other concerns the transfer of more than €650,000 to the former managing director of Allied Newspapers.

There is also the magisterial inquiry, which is expected to be concluded in the weeks or months to come, into the alleged illicit transfer of $1,017,000 by the daughter of the President of Azerbaijan to a bank account in Malta that allegedly belonged to the Prime Minister’s wife Michelle. Both the Prime Minister and his wife have strongly denied such allegations.

However, in the event that the investigating magistrate establishes something against Muscat or his wife and decides that a criminal investigation should be conducted, the Prime Minister has already declared that he would resign and leave politics for good.

During the election campaign, Muscat repeatedly made pledges of accountability, meritocracy and transparency, just as he had already done prior to the 2013 election but failed to keep.

One sincerely hopes that this time these will not be just campaign promises and that Muscat will not adopt the Machiavellian line of reasoning that it is okay to lie if keeping one’s word places one at a disadvantage or if the reasons for giving one’s word no longer exist.

We will soon be able to see whether Muscat has really learned from his mistakes during the last legislature, as we have so often heard him say in the course of his election campaign. We have yet to see whether the country continues to face mounting scandals as it has been doing ever since he rose to power in March four years ago.

Muscat would have learned nothing if he continues defending Schembri despite the allegations linking him to financial crimes. Both prior to and after the election, Muscat said that if the magisterial inquiries point to wrongdoing on Schembri’s part he will have to resign. Possibly capitalising on his strong political position following Labour’s second landslide election victory, Muscat has decided to keep his right-hand man with him just the same. Let’s see what happens next.

Time will tell.