Put more simply in English, this is the age-old policy, supposedly first verbalised by Philip II of Macedon and later put to excellent use by Julius Caesar, Napoleon, and the British in India, of ‘divide and rule’. It should be self-explanatory (and self-evident), but it never fails to astonish me just how many people are unable to recognise the strategic truth of this maxim, and how resistant they are to seeing it. They would, of course, make hopeless military or political strategists, but that is just the point.

Dividing to rule is particularly easy in Maltese society, which forms part of a Mediterranean culture – one anthropological study after another has shown – that is made up of people who are historically resistant to cooperating with others for a commonly beneficial end, preferring to make life difficult by going it alone, setting up individual outfits, and achieving a negative or otherwise inferior outcome.

It also has a lot to do with people’s inability, in this particular society, to focus on getting straight from A to B without getting sidetracked via K and Z. One of the manifestations of this Maltese pathology is that political parties appear to have become an end in themselves rather than what they should be, which is the means to a variety of ends in running the country and implementing policy.  And that means the sole purpose of a political party is to get into government, which also means that there is no place in the spectrum for political parties which have no chance of governing.

I do not agree with Marlene Farrugia’s decision to set up a political party of her own. Strategically, it is a disaster for her primary aim and purpose which, it can be gathered clearly from everything she has said, written and done since she resigned the Labour Party whip, is to make sure that Joseph Muscat and his band of thieves are thrown out of office at the next general election. But now a competing aim has entered the equation, which is to set up a fledging political party and enter the electoral race with it in 2018. The two are in direct conflict. Dr Farrugia cannot fight against Labour’s re-election to government by dividing the Labour Party’s opposition, but with her new party, that is exactly what she is doing.

Lack of clarity of thought is a major and common Maltese failing. People look at the three political parties which are now opposed to the Labour government and its corruption and they see a big, strong and varied opposition, instead of a fragmented one. This, of course, is crackers. It would be a big, strong and varied opposition if all three were united with each other against the Labour Party, instead of all being against the Labour Party and also against each other. You don’t have to be Montgomery of Alamein to see that the Labour Party’s foes willbe divided among themselves at the general election, too busy competing with each other for votes to go for the common enemy’s throat, while support among its allies will remain monolithic. The inevitable result of that is that Labour will win the war and Joseph Muscat will be prime minister again, from 2018 to 2023, with Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri at his side. Presumably, this is a scenario that neither Marlene Farrugia nor Alternattiva Demokratika want, but once again, both will be going out of their way to ensure that it becomes reality because neither outfit can face the reality that the only way to kick Muscat out is by making Busuttil prime minister.

This is not a matter of the smaller parties taking votes only from the Nationalist Party. It goes way beyond that. It is simple common sense. In every general election – in every life situation, really – you have to decide what outcome you would rather have and then you have to act to get that outcome. I repeat this at every general election, but apparently it is such a novel concept in a society where people cut down trees to be able to reach the fruit, rather than getting a ladder (that’s just a metaphor) that I may as well say it again. There are only ever two choices of government: Labour or Nationalist. There are only ever two choices of prime minister: the Labour leader or the Nationalist leader. Which one do you prefer? Saying ‘neither of them’ is infantile. You are going to get one of them whether you like it or not. So stick to the point: which one do you prefer?

Once you have answered that question, the next thing to do is grow up and understand that if you’d rather have Party X in government and leader X as Prime Minister, then you have got to ruddy well vote for them. Saying that you don’t want Joseph Muscat to become prime minister again in 2018 and have him in power until 2023, but then voting for AD or Marlene Farrugia’s party instead of for the Nationalist Party is, quite simply, cracked. It’s like deciding you want to go to Rome, but instead of buying a ticket to Rome, buying a ticket to London instead and hoping that it will somehow take you to Rome anyway by some kind of circuitous magical route.

Nobody is more delighted than Joseph Muscat that Marlene Farrugia has set up her own party. He knows that he is bleeding votes so heavily that no tourniquet can stem the flow at this late stage. If those votes go to the Nationalist Party, it’s game over for him. If those electors don’t turn up to the ballot-box, or if they do turn up and mark the boxes for AD and Marlene Farrugia’s party, he’ll be returned to power. The only party that can turf that corrupt gang out of power is the only one that can form a government, the Nationalist Party. And this means that everyone and anyone who wants to see the back of Joseph Muscat and his thieving outfit, of Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri and the rest of them, has to vote for the Nationalist Party, because there is no other way.

This is not rocket science. It’s exactly why I and so many others began voting for the Nationalist Party and continue to do so: primarily to keep a very dangerous political party out of power. The Nationalist Party was returned to power again and again on the strength of the votes of those who wanted to keep dangerous, malign Labour out of government. When those people stopped doing that, in 2013, disaster ensued. Disaster for Malta, that is.

There will be people who sneer at this reasoning – tactical voting for the Nationalist Party to keep malign Labour out of power - but they can sneer all they like. The fact of the matter is that it is those of us who have voted consistently and strategically to keep Labour out of office who were proved right in 1996 and again in 2013. We are the ones who should be sneering now at those who thought themselves so superior and so much more politically evolved than we are. Quite frankly, they were just idiotic. I am surprised they can see for all the egg streaming down their faces.

From here on in, Joseph Muscat and his 1001 thieves will be doing all they can to encourage – or not to discourage – Marlene Farrugia’s new party and Alternattiva Demokratika. Having given up hope of getting back the bulk of the votes they have lost (around 30,000 at the last estimate), their aim now will be to make sure those votes don’t migrate to Simon Busuttil and the Nationalist Party. The likelihood of all those people not voting is small; Maltese people like to vote, even if they say in surveys that they have no desire to do that. So Muscat will be aiming to have as many as possible of his lost votes go to Marlene and to Caccopardo. In short, ‘divide and rule’ is the policy of maintaining control over your opponents by encouraging dissent between them, thereby preventing them from uniting in opposition to you. In setting up a new party, Marlene Farrugia is not fighting against Muscat, but fighting for him. Once again, she and her companion Godfrey Farrugia are on the same side.

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