Those who bothered to hear or follow the speeches by the two leaders on Sunday could be mistaken if they thought they were living in two different worlds.
On the one hand, the Prime Minister boasted of a long list of achievements brought about by his party.
And the Leader of the Opposition went off on a very different tack altogether, focusing mostly on the hospitals contracts.
In between, the thinking public is expected to make up its mind and to understand what’s going on.
But it’s like getting half dozen of one and six of the other – you cannot compare the two speeches for they simply cannot be matched.
On the one hand, for instance, there is no disputing the achievements listed by the Prime Minister. But that is only one aspect of the Muscat legacy. It must also include the negative aspects of the PL legacy on which the past years have been one long list of allegations of corruption.
It is true that not one case has been satisfactorily and definitely proved, considering the government and key persons in it keeps putting up a huge battle on every little legal issue. That does not mean, however, that the taint of corruption, the smell of sleaze, has not come to envelop the entire country.
On the other hand, the Leader of the Opposition focused mostly on the legal challenge he is putting up with regards to the contracts handing the hospitals to a private company.
He however, seemed to have nothing to say about the allegations surfacing about himself, nor about allegations made by others, mainly Daphne Caruana Galizia, about other corruption issues.
Nor had he anything positive to say about this government’s economic record.
One does expect a political leader to emphasise his stance, his point of view. That is normal. But to have the two leaders, as we seem we will get Sunday after Sunday from now to May, drumming the same point in in this dialogue of the deaf, does not do anything positive to the country as a whole.
All this dialogue of the deaf, enlarged and amplified then by the respective radio stations and other media of the parties, will only create the type of fanaticism, verbal and even physical aggression that was evident in the fracas that took place behind the scenes on Xarabank last Friday.
The two leaders are intelligent enough to realise that this dialogue of the deaf does no good to the country and actually does harm to it.