Now that the dust has settled on the 2017 general election, we can list and see the winners, and the losers.

I am not talking here about macro issues, the parties, but about individuals, the politicians who make up the political world. Their choice is an exciting and a difficult one at the same time. I have known some who would have given up at the first electoral reverse but most soldier on and persistence pays.

I admire people like Michael Falzon who was kicked out of office (while others did worse and were retained) but did not give up. He went and got himself elected from two districts.

Or people like Hermann Schiavone whose party gave in to blackmail and forbade him from contesting. Then he went and got himself elected as a local councillor and from there he became an MP.

I remember meeting Aaron Farrugia on the corner next to the Phoenicia and in just two minutes he explained his plan to me. Not for him the high road through Europe. I saw him some weeks before the election was called, going round from house to house in the Scouts area of Hamrun. He is now not just an MP but a parliamentary secretary as well, with an important portfolio.

Over the past weeks we have been focusing on the parties, and dissecting their failures or their successes. But beyond the parties and their successes/failures, there are the candidates who each have a story to tell. Many are not successful at first but they refocus and try again, working harder than ever. Sooner or later, unless there are other factors, they make the grade.

And having got their feet in the Chamber, they continue to move, usually up. It all depends, certainly, on their party’s success in the polls but our national experience tells us the parties alternate in power, usually every two terms. A wise leader spreads out the Shadow Cabinet posts around to as many people as can fit in. It was only Lawrence Gonzi, as I remember, who restricted Cabinet to a very tight group thus preparing the ground for his great defeat. People in the Gonzi Cabinet did not have anywhere to go: they had arrived. Those who wanted to climb up were kept rigidly outside the door, and they paid him back for that.

The above shows, in a way, some of the limitations of our system, in which a candidate has to battle against colleagues from the same party rather than against the other party. To be elected, a candidate has to make himself known to the voters from his party, so that if they do not vote for him at first, they at least give him their second preference.

That is what happened, for instance, in the 10^th District. I believe John Dalli did this in the past, although he was not from that district. He knew that the Sliema voters were lukewarm if not angry with the Nationalist government for having allowed so many tall buildings that reduced roads to dark alleys with no sun and capitalized on their anger. He was elected.

This time round the same ruse was used by two candidates who both were elected at by-elections. Karol Aquilina, a sharp lawyer from Siġġiewi and mayor of that village, ran in the 10^th District as well and was elected while his own district did not elect him.

And even more significantly, Godfrey Farrugia, who until April was the Labour whip, ran in the 10^th District and while not getting elected in Zebbug, the town where he lives and where he was mayor, got himself elected in Sliema as part of the Democratic Party which in turn formed part of the Nationalist Party.

This in turn had a further spin-off. In Siġġiewi, former colleague Alessia Psaila Zammit, wife of NET anchorman Frank Psaila, became mayor (Siggiewi’s first female mayor) while in Naxxar Anne Marie Muscat Fenech Adami replaced Maria Deguara as mayor of that town.

Much has been made of the power of incumbency and the widespread recruitment of people that in places like Gozo left companies bereft of people who flocked to join the government. I thought we had left this sort of thing behind us because the Gonzi administration had claimed it had put an end to government jobs on the eve of the election, but then this is a traditional Maltese (like the Greek) way of politics. I remember in 1966 George Borg Olivier visiting Zejtun where I now live and humorously saying that Sandy Cachia Zammit needed to employ Santa Katerina to have employed the whole village.

Then there is a descent to correspond to the ascent. Politicians are thrown out by an ungrateful electorate much before the politician himself realizes it. Seeing parts of yesterday’s State Opening of Parliament, I could see some who are living (in Parliament) on borrowed time. There were more in the last Parliament – some saw the signs and stopped, others campaigned again and were rejected.

But then Malta is, generally speaking, ungrateful to former politicians with no senate or the equivalent of the House of Lords where elder statesmen can give the nation the benefit of their experience. And some, from Mintoff to others are made to leave under a cloud.

One basic fault with this system, in my opinion, is that what it takes is sheer ambition to succeed as a politician. Few, as I see it, bother to acquire the skills and the training. Then they get to manage departments with thousands of workers, handle millions of euros and meet their counterparts in Europe – only in this case, their counterparts may turn out to be as ill-prepared as they are.

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