Strong polarisation works against the Nationalist Party, PN Spokesperson for Transport and Mobility Mark Anthony Sammut told The Malta Independent.

He was responding to questions regarding the political situation in Malta. In the first part of the interview that was published in The Malta Independent on Sunday, Sammut was asked about the government's proposals to tackle the traffic situation in the country.

When asked whether he is concerned about a recent poll indicating a decline in support for the PN, he confirmed that he is. "I am concerned as my ultimate aim is for the PN to win the next general election and be in government. On the one hand we must not be fatalist; the result of the last survey shows that we are in the same water we were in during the local council elections last year. The result of the survey is nearly the same. I would have liked that almost a year after those elections we would have moved forward more, and we need to look into what we are doing wrong, the way we are delivering our message and if it is reaching people; perhaps we rely too heavily on traditional media and aren't making enough impact on the platforms people use more frequently today - many young people now get their news exclusively from social media, and we may still be lagging behind in effectively reaching them there.

What is sure, he said, "is that we must never blame people or point fingers. We need to reflect and see what we are doing wrong and see where we can improve".

When it was pointed out that over the last year the rhetoric used by the two major parties has become more hateful towards one another, he was asked if this is having an impact, and whether it or a lack of public confidence in the PN's policies might be contributing to the problem.

"Strong polarisation always works against the PN," he said, adding that the PN's group of hardcore supporters is far smaller than the PL's group.

"When there is very confrontational polarisation, which there is, people in the middle switch off - the undecided voters, the nonvoters, the floating voters. The worst thing that could happen is that they switch off and stop following politics. At the end of the day those are the people you need to convince. That is why it might make sense for Labour to conduct these campaigns, as it did, to fire up and strengthen its hardcore voters - bringing Joseph Muscat back in, the attack it made on the judiciary when inquiry results began coming out, the law it passed to stop citizens from opening magisterial inquiries - these are things that galvanise the Labour hardcore supporters," he said.

"Unfortunately, these aren't things that affected the middleof-the-road voters so much, or perhaps they are seeing these bad things but are not convinced that the PN is better," which, he added, is something the PN needs to work on.

He said that polarisation works against the PN, but continued that where one has to be angry and criticise, "we must criticise strongly. But we need to be careful for that strong criticism to remain on the argument, and never become personal. I'm not saying that we were personal, I don't think we were. In the criticism we made I don't see occasions when we ever made it personal, it was more the opposite where the Labour Party, even through its media machine, targeted people, and conducted a whole campaign saying that an MP is the de facto leader, or is controlling Bernard Grech, or forms part of an extremist faction".