It seems that the current perception is that local council elections are just that… local and that their outcome is predictably against the government of the day and easily overturned in a general election.

The local council elections held three years ago in the same localities which hold theirs next Saturday are a case in point.

Labour won that election with 52.2 per cent of the votes to the PN’s 44.8 per cent. Labour supporters crowed with joy and some One News journalists in their typical confrontational mode cornered Eddie Fenech Adami as he was leaving the PN headquarters asking him: “With a result like this, how dare you face the people?” He did, exactly a year later, and won.

There has been a hue and cry over the past weeks over the PN’s surprising decision not to contest in Zejtun and Marsa, both Labour strongholds. No team worth its salt offers its adversary unnecessary walkovers and this decision has proved to be inexplicable more to PN supporters who risked their lives to see the citizens of Zejtun vote in freedom, than to MLP supporters who are used to such stratagems.

Malta is still, until proved otherwise, basically a tribal country where PN/MLP supporters are born so and remain so. The difference in elections is explained by the few who are won over to the other side and which side succeeds in getting out its vote more.

In the past years, Labour had the greater difficulty in getting out its vote in local council elections given its former opposition to them, but that seems to have been ironed out and today Alfred Sant is supported by the party far and wide. Whether he succeeds in getting out the vote, despite the two huge public meetings and the strenuous efforts the whole party has been making to mobilise public opinion, still remains to be seen.

It is easier to forecast voter apathy, which is worse on the side of the PN supporters who get worked up only on the big issues such as the EU or the probability of Dr Sant at Castille (and even that did not work in 1996). They may also decide to punish the government for the various faults or deficiencies they may perceive, whether they be the gas cylinders, the Budget measures, eco-tax or what have you.

The challenge facing Alternattiva is to prove that the vote it obtained in last June’s European Parliament election was no fluke. By contesting in strong PN localities it has meanwhile proved the point that it tends to take its support from core PN areas rather than from MLP ones.

Then there are the mostly local issues which tend to vary from place to place and from year to year. This year’s crop is quite interesting with the contest at Mellieha being by far the most interesting and keen. As can be seen from the tables on page 2, there are other localities where the difference between the parties is minimal, which makes the PN decision to withdraw from Zejtun and Marsa all the more pitiful.

There remains the macro-vision over and above the micro-vision. For all the shouting and the spin, there isn’t much to differentiate the programmes and policies of the two main parties. The main difference between them is that they both claim: We can do this better than the others. For all the PN’s demonising of the MLP document (it IS an MLP document, even with all the qualifications it is a draft document for discussion), the solutions outlined there are, by and large, what the PN government would like to do were it not afraid it would be clobbered to death by the MLP if it dared do anything like that – see the public feasts on Saturday issue as an example.

This government is bravely tackling the real issues, whether they be the fiscal deficit, tackling the environmental problems, boosting education and training, rebuilding the roads, and so on. It is nowhere near there yet, and it must understand it must deliver more and faster.

We criticised it last week, and still do, that it must get its act together, that it is a government without a centre, without a rapid reaction task force when anything happens such as the gas shortage.

Even more, it is on its way, but yet still short of understanding how to square the circle, which is the key to all that governing Malta is all about: achieving growth, boosting the economy in a sustainable way, not in the artificial ways of the past decade which all left us unhealthily, economically sick. It is just not right to try and get the deficit figures right at the cost of the taxpayers. Nor is it right to be content with growth even if that is jobless growth.

The investment decisions announced over the past days, especially Farsons’, are good news but we need far more foreign direct investment, and as quickly as possible.

The government must do far more to prove it relies on the resourcefulness of the Maltese worker and to allow that resilience a free hand to see it deliver growth. No amount of spin, no amount of demonising the other side, can deliver as much as real growth can.