As we near Election Day and as the parties strain their utmost to garner every floating vote lying around, the tension has now sky-rocketed and will remain so until midday next Sunday, by which time the winner will presumably be known.

It is not my intention today to try and forecast who the winner will be. The forecasts are there, the polls too, and the writing seems to be on the wall. However, this is an election unlike all others and predictions can be wrong.

The issue of who is to govern the country goes beyond polls, votes and percentages. An election – least of all the coming one – will not resolve the question of who is right, who is the person best-suited to govern the country. It will only say that a majority of voters have declared that candidate and party X are to govern. It will not say who is right.

It may be, for it has happened in the past, that the majority of voters make the wrong decision, for any reason or for no reason at all. I will not play the numbers game today. What I want to examine is the core issue of this election and who is best suited to tackle this core issue.

I have to be true to what I have written in the previous months. Up until some months ago, certainly mid-March, I was arguing against an election campaign that becomes an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation. That hope was not to be realised; it is a great pity and the result is what we have in front of us today. We have had charges regarding the spouse of the Prime Minister and on Friday we had the Prime Minister shedding all dignity and calling his opponent a ‘chicken’. It’s like mud-wrestling on a national scale.

We’ve been here before – in 2004, in 2008 – but never with this virulence. To think we chose the EU among other reasons in order not to repeat such a confrontation, which splits the country down the middle. People have again become polarised and the social media is making things worse. For now we have become used to expressing our opinions in the social media and now friends have become enemies and acre comments have become the order of the day.

Starting from the day after the election, whoever wins will have to start preaching unity – which is quite hard when you have spent the previous months engaged in divisive talk.

An election should be focused on the track record of the outgoing government and the proposals of the parties contending the election. Instead, the election is being fought around claims and allegations of corruption on the part of the governing party.

This issue has now become such a central theme that Friday’s Xarabank was centred around it. And such was the centrality of this issue that the Prime Minister was forced to defend himself by bringing up three allegations of corruption against Simon Busuttil, Mario de Marco and Beppe Fenech Adami to counter the PN allegations about Joseph Muscat, Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri.

The allegations about the Castille trio have long been made, while the allegations against the PN trio are new and require investigation. The core issue in this election is whether the country can afford to give a second term to a Prime Minister who, while admitting he may have been wrong to keep the other two in power, has defended himself by saying he needed them for the projects in hand. This is rather unfair on the rest of the largest Cabinet in history who, no doubt, were doing their best. (We do not know, nor will we ever know, what those who decided to step down told the PM to his face at their last meeting.)

Among the arguments Dr Muscat has taken to using is to compare his readiness to go if the Egrant investigation by the magistrate turns up anything to substantiate the allegations involving his wife, with Dr Busuttil’s evident discomfiture to make the same pledge. It’s like Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes on the mountain cliff edge. I really cannot understand this. Winning or losing the election does not mean the winner is right and the loser is wrong, but I am sure that whether it is Dr Muscat or Dr Busuttil who loses, he will have reached the end of their political lives. I don’t know why Dr Busuttil did not come up with this response at the university and ever since.

Long, long ago, when the Panama Papers issue had just begun, officials and pundits expressed regret that this case had made people forget the good that the government had done. A week before the election, we can now see how the corruption issue has even obscured what the government is proposing for the next five years.

With so many FIAU reports, concluded or not, becoming public knowledge they might as well have issued them as press releases, as what should have remained confidential is now public knowledge. This breach of confidentiality is appalling, rendered barely acceptable by the blank wall the reports have run into.

That is what you get when the workings of a democracy get jammed or fall into disuse. This over-arching issue of corruption has overtaken any discussion on the respective programmes of the parties. Nor has it allowed a serene and dispassionate assessment of the outgoing administration.

Even so, the first four years of Muscat have included some successes (especially in the liberalisation of laws) but also some signal failures. I hazard a sort of list: the many scandals hitting the country from Café Premier to Gaffarena; the clientelism spawned by the biggest Cabinet of all time; the rampant and blatant promotions for partisan merit in the police and the armed forces; the stuffing of ministries, agencies, etc., with blue-eyed boys, etc. For these reasons alone, Muscat does not merit a reconfirmation. He himself, in a way, admits this. And on top of everything are the claims of corruption.

Muscat promises he will do better, like all schoolboys say after they fail the exam, but can he be trusted after breaking so many promises and commitments? Four-and-a-half years are more than enough to realise what mistakes have been made and to correct them. Instead, Muscat keeps defending the indefensible.

This does not mean that a Busuttil administration will definitely be better. That is still to be seen. But any doubts must not lead to a conclusion that it is better to remain with the devil we know. The greatest pity of this election is that we have had no idea about new challenges, new directions or new opportunities. What we have got is a commitment by Labour to re-do all roads – surely needed but also the least innovative, technologically advanced and the most subservient to the construction lobby we can have, when we could have been promised a wifi island, blockchain, enhanced digital means, etc.

Instead of it all being talk about visions for the future, we now have a financial services sector (surely the real motor of growth in these past years) that is in tatters and panicking at the possibility of companies leaving after 3 June. It doesn’t take much to relocate: just book a flight, shut down the laptops and get a taxi to the airport. Then they will leave us to continue our tribal feuding on our own.

This week the Der Spiegel carried a caustic article about Malta and the lax way it supervises the gaming industry, quoting a whistleblower. It may indeed be, as the PN poster has it, that the fish is rotten from the top (Il-huta minn rasha tinten) but the rot goes all the way down. On 3 June we either confirm the bazaar character of our people or once again we make the grade to the next level.

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