The one thing, which all Nationalists and Labour supporters agreed on before the local council elections results were announced, was that the government would suffer heavy losses.

They differed, as was to be expected, on the percentage figures. That is academic now, as the results will be complete by the time this paper reaches our readers.

Now comes the tsunami of comment. And the country waits to see what the government’s reaction will be.

After the 12 June European Parliament defeat the government promised to listen to the people. Instead it persuaded itself that it did not really need to listen, that it was the country which needed to listen to the government, so all the government had to do was to stick to its guns and get the people to listen more. The results of yesterday’s elections will demonstrate how effective this tack has been.

There will probably be the usual speculation on reshuffles especially at Cabinet level. The usual speculation on who’s in and who’s out. And possibly some cosmetic changes in the way the government is branded and packaged to the country.

It will take far far more than that. Whatever the result.

Two years into its term the government needs to make a far more radical change. The present government, led by the present Prime Minister, came to power almost seamlessly in the wake of the previous EU-oriented PN government. It made it to the EU by the skin of its teeth and while being in the EU is a bonus for the whole of Malta, it risked missing the bus by a whisker.

That is now history. Malta is now in the EU (even though it has not exactly shone so far, or contributed to anything, least of all by the calibre of the people sent there), nor can it be said that Malta has profited much from membership.

But the challenges that today’s Malta faces demand much much more than just continuing to implement what the previous PN government wanted to do or should have done. The problems facing Malta today demand a break, far more than a continuation, from what used to be done by the previous government. And they demand a radical rethinking of what being a country is all about, how growth can be generated, what can be done for our people and how Malta can prosper in the future.

With all due respect for all the good intentions and the hard work of the present government team, there is no sign yet that they have understood all the implications of what the country is telling them.

This government spent the last half of the year in a failed attempt to reach an agreement on a social pact with the unions and the employers. It banged its head against the wall of mutual mistrust and hurt itself in the process. But it neglected to try and reach an agreement on a social pact with the people as a whole. Instead of reaching out to the people, it preferred to closet itself with the social representatives, who in turn became so many representatives of interest groups and hence the total failure. There was no attempt to disengage itself from that fatal embrace.

To get some kind of sanity back into the country, to reach the rock base of the nation, to find the key to the future, the government must do the unthinkable, it must question the key assumptions which have led us here, and it must have the humility to admit there is a need to retrace our collective paces and draw back from the cliff edge.

What this paper is afraid of is a continuum of arrogance and a desperate stubbornness, which have come to the fore over the previous months, that this government knows what it is doing and that it will stick to what it is doing even though it knows that the jaws of failure and defeat stare it in the face. What started off as a government of ‘decisiveness’ is ending like a government of pig-headedness.

Take anything at will. Take, for instance, the blasted deficit that is at the root of the country’s sluggish growth and which would hamper any government attempting to do what is right. The long and short of it all is that the government has still not brought its expenditure down to levels below the revenue. The government share of employment is still far too large and growing if not through direct government employment in the civil service, through the many government agencies, corporations and authorities. This government, in its 18 years of administration, has tried hard to create a civil service outside the civil service, to go round what it perceived (perceives) as a hostile, Labour-nurtured, civil service, an aboulic PSC, and all the various restrictions and red tape implicit in that. But it has only created a further tier of red tape, bureaucrats, expenditure and time-wasters. And the man at the bottom of the heap, who used to pay for one tier, now has to pay for two.

The way forward is to go back, in this case. To a simpler system, one tier, shorter time frames, corners cut and letting the people prosper.

The present government must be clear as well what it is leading the country to. The carrot that is being dangled in front of the country’s face is to go back to the times of the politician as tribune, where the politician is the one who delivers, who unties the knots and untangles the system, where the politician replaces the machine instead of having a machine that replaces the politician. Now that would really be pulling the country back into pre-history.

Creating more and more systems, more and more tiers, will not work. Unless the government understands it is there to lessen the burden and allow growth to foster, it will go down and take the country with it.

There are other considerations to make, and the time to make them will come in the next weeks, once the import of today’s figures sinks in.