Arnold Cassola said after the election result was out: “We did not manage to get our message across.” How about: “We didn’t get the message?”

Cassola steps down in October. I’m not surprised. If people are going to vote AD at all, they’re more likely to do it in an EP election than a general election. So failure now is real failure. Unlike the Nationalist Party, AD can’t rationalise the result by saying that electors protested against them, because they’re not in government.

Cassola says that the result was worse than they expected. But why did they expect a better one? All the polls predicted that AD was barely on the radar. Cassola did the same old thing and blamed lack of media exposure. But AD had barely any media exposure in 2004 and still it polled nine per cent of the vote. It ran a highly effective word-of-mouth campaign, and did exactly what Labour did this time in targeting the socio-economic group to which I belong, with drinks parties, lunches, informal gatherings to meet Cassola, key ‘recruiters’ and so on. The system, and it was used by Labour in this election, is roughly the same as one of those botox parties where you go along, have a few drinks and buy the botox sessions – except that in this case, the sales spiel comes from a political candidate.

But I must say that Cassola could have done nothing to turn around people’s general indifference to his party. Back in 2004 he was seen as fresh and exciting, green and glamorous, and people were still on an EU high and wanted to do something they thought was distinctly European: vote green.

Cassola has learned that even the best of us are fickle. A politician is the botox for your problems one minute, with those who hope they are hip jostling for a piece of him. Then the next minute he’s neither fashionable nor glamorous and people have moved on to the next thing. We do the same with bars and restaurants.

So now AD say they are going to do some soul-searching to see what went wrong. Weren’t they supposed to have done this already after last year’s general election? As I understood it, their public relations person Claire Bonello, who writes a column for The Sunday Times, and Kurt Sansone, who now works in The Times newsroom, were responsible for that particular project.

Arnold Cassola says now that the Maltese “have lost their chance to be represented in the Greens’ group in the EP... because the people haven’t understood the importance of being represented in the parliament’s three groups.”

That’s one way of putting it. Another way would be to say that the Maltese people just didn’t want to elect Arnold Cassola, at least not after he decided he’s Italian one day and Maltese the next, depending on where the opportunities lie.

And then Cassola repeated the AD propaganda which those who truly worked to take Malta into the EU find so deeply offensive: “If it were not for us, we would not be in the EU today.” Oh, bother off.

Support for AD in the 2003 general election campaign nearly cost Malta EU membership. Splitting the pro-EU vote between the Nationalist Party and AD would have meant the election of Alfred Sant as prime minister.

Convincing people that this would happen, despite the propaganda being spread by AD activists, was one of the hardest parts of the campaign, and in the last few weeks, one of the most time-consuming. I never left the house without a calculator in my handbag, because without fail, people would come up to me and ask me whether it was ‘safe’ to vote AD, because AD had told them it was.

I even found myself in the absurd situation of going to the garage where my car was being serviced to have the foreman ask me for an explanation and gather his workmen around to listen to it. Their previous client had been somebody who told them that if they were in favour of EU membership it was safe to vote AD in the general election.

The situation was so bad, especially among socio-economic groups A and B, that Eddie Fenech Adami was advised to explain clearly, at the final mass meeting of the general election campaign, what would happen if pro-EU voters gave their vote to AD instead of to the Nationalist Party: Alfred Sant would become prime minister and there would be no EU membership for Malta.

AD interpreted this as an attack on their party, and reacted rabidly. It has regarded the Nationalist Party as its sworn enemy ever since, and has missed no opportunity to spit on it – though I must admit that Cassola is extremely benign compared to his hard-faced and bitterly angry predecessor, whose preferred stance was that of put-upon martyr.

The whole thing might have been fun while it lasted, but now it’s time to let go.



Daphne Caruana Galizia’s blog is at www.daphnecaruanagalizia.com