Every polling day, I find myself writing a column for publication on the morrow, when the electoral results are out and anything written is going to be dead in the water. Yet I am not even remotely tempted to resolve the dilemma by writing about something completely different, because on election weekend, columns that self-consciously avoid the topic are pointless. They’re not interesting to write, and they are even less interesting to read.
This has been a rather odd campaign, one in which there has been significant dissonance between the engagement of the political parties themselves and the disengagement of the electorate. You could sense throughout that the parties were campaigning among an electorate that was largely thoroughly bored of it all. Labour pushed hard and harder, pulling out all the stops with billboards, advertisements, campaign buses, leafleting, meetings and press conferences several times a week. And this time, it had the government on board to help. But I was left thinking that the more Labour pushed, the more people switched off.
Among supporters of the Nationalist Party, the sense of disengagement from the campaign was of a different order. Some rapidly became tired of it all, others were still disillusioned after last year’s debacle, but most others needed no campaign at all to persuade them of the need to vote and how to do it. The Nationalist campaign was low-key in the extreme, back to basics and low budget – but to a certain extent, it needed no official campaign at all because people have been talking among themselves and haven’t really needed the party machine to explain to them where and how this government is going wrong.
The general sense of disengagement and of simmering resentment towards both major political parties was reflected in the relatively large number of people who failed to collect their voting document. They either simply could not be bothered to collect it, or they wanted to make a point of showing that they had not even gone to the effort of picking it up, a message in itself. And those are just the people who were not at home when the police came calling to drop off their voting documents. There will have been lots of others who were at home and who had no choice but to accept their documents, but who then failed to use them to vote yesterday.
Buoyed by poll after poll which showed a large majority for the Labour Party, the Prime Minister raised his game by saying that this election is a straight contest between him personally and Simon Busuttil. He said that because he is certain of his majority, and he wishes to aggrandise himself further and seize legitimacy for any further controversial plans he may have which were not in his party’s electoral programme and for which he does not have an electoral mandate. He also wishes to beat down the Opposition leader, weakening democracy even further than it has been weakened by the strong majority which has caused him to believe that he can govern like an autocrat for five years. But the ‘straight contest between me and him’ challenge has not gone down at all well with the electorate. People didn’t like it. It came across as a street-fighter’s challenge and an egocentric sally. Some people actually bothered to remember that this is all about choosing the best people to represent Malta in the European Parliament.
Simon Busuttil is facing his first real challenge as Opposition leader. Joseph Muscat is up against the first test to his so far unmitigated arrogance. I get the sense – perhaps it is my imagination, but then again perhaps not – that just a year on, people are already sick and tired of the sheer imbalance of power between the government and the Opposition, that the government is bulldozing its way through unchallenged, and that the Opposition is too badly weakened to do much about it. But these people are reacting in different ways: some are angry with the government for which they voted; others are angry with the Opposition for which they voted; Labour voters are disillusioned and PN voters are disillusioned too. The general feeling is that it would be reassuring if things were on a more even keel, with the government actually bothering to concern itself with what people think of its behaviour and worrying about public opinion, and with the Opposition putting up as stiff a challenge as possible to the government even with its nine seats fewer in Parliament.
Whether people voted yesterday to shift the balance of power to something a little more normal, by trimming the Labour Party’s spectacular 2013 majority, remains to be seen later on today.
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