With yesterday’s victory celebration at The Granaries, Election 2017 has officially drawn to an end. The new Cabinet of Ministers will roll up their sleeves and get down to work on implementing the government’s new five-year roadmap, and there will be considerable ground to cover given the proportions of the Labour Party’s electoral pledges.

The Opposition, battered from another trouncing at the polls will set about electing a leader, deputy leaders and a new administration for the party. And plans will begin to be made for who will take the place of the Prime Minister after the current legislature since Joseph Muscat has made it perfectly clear that this will be his final term in office.

The populace will return to normality and begin awaiting ‘the country’s best days’, and everyday life will return to business as usual.

But as the government returns to its own business as usual, there will still be those pesky, multifaceted corruption allegations hanging over its head like a sword of Damocles. From Egrant to Pilatus, from Panama to Dubai and from the LNG tanker to the Enemalta privatisation, any member of the public, irrespective of their political stripe, may be forgiven for suffering from a bout of scandal fatigue.

Some of those scandals took over a year to make it to a magistrate, while others surfaced with increasing frequency and intensity as the electoral campaign progressed.

But scandal fatigue does not make a scandal go away, nor does a popular vote exonerate those who have been accused and implicated and those who have been investigated or subjected to magisterial inquiries.

There are many among us who are of the misguided and erroneous opinion that all the allegations of corruption should now be laid to rest because the people have spoken, and quite clearly at that, at the polls. Anyone of such an opinion could do with a basic refresher course in justice, and perhaps in the separation of powers.

The magisterial inquiries underway will continue unabated and if there is justice to be served, it will be served. Anyone found guilty in this great mosaic of corruption allegations will undoubtedly face the full brunt of the law. That is the least to be expected of a modern democracy.

The people have spoken, but justice has not spoken yet. And when it does, its voice will be respected.

Perhaps it was too much to be expected of a modern democracy for those facing very serious and legitimate accusations to have stepped down from their positions until their names are cleared, or otherwise. The Prime Minister’s chief of staff is one such individual who springs to mind in this context, but, given the resounding mandate the public has given the government for the next five years, it undoubtedly feels it is utterly unassailable and that it can do no wrong in the public’s eye.

And while the people’s vote is sacrosanct and is to be wholly respected, that vote does not mean the government will not be held accountable for its, or its components’ flagrancy.

After the Opposition’s trouncing at the polls, there will be no flurry of investigations being launched, no publication of the numerous contracts that have never seen the full light of day and no fine tooth combing through of the plethora of alleged scandals that had reared their ugly heads over the last four years and over the last year of the Panama Papers in particular.

As this newspaper said last week, as the ballot sheets were awaiting counting in Naxxar now that the Labour Party has succeeded in its bid to hold on to power in the wake of this bitterly divisive electoral campaign, the fight against all that was wrong with the government over this past legislature will not end here. The Prime Minister will certainly be held to his word to not allow any more misconduct as exposed by the Panama Papers under his watch.

Sleeping dogs will certainly not be left to lie.