Though not entirely unexpected, the size of the victory registered by the MLP at last Saturday’s local elections must be at the top end of their expectations and probably below the bottom end of the PN’s.

Deciphering the local elections vote is always trickier than that of a general election, not only because it is a one-third sample of the electorate but also because different convictions and motivations are in play.

How much does the result reflect local realities which will have no bearing at general elections and how much does it reflect wider national issues which will shape voting patterns when in three years’ time we will have to re-decide the formation of a new national legislature?

The complex intermingling of these two related but distinct influences make deciphering local election results far from straightforward. If the voters in Mqabba and Santa Venera decided to change their local administration from PN to MLP, then certainly it has something to do with the unimpressive performance of the outgoing council in these localities led by a PN mayor.

If voters in marginal localities like Zebbug and Mellieha chose to re-confirm with a much wider majority a Labour-led council, then it must be a show of endorsement for the work done by the outgoing councils. The same can be said of Zurrieq, Pembroke and Xewkija, where Labour have consolidated their existent strong majorities. Taken individually, locality by locality, results must somehow reflect local realities.

But taken collectively, the size of the voting sample is big enough to have some meaning for voting preferences at national level. And the crystal clear message of relevance to the PN in government is that the people are grossly unhappy with their performance and that given a real choice, people will gladly consign them to the opposition side of the national parliament. A margin of nine per cent for MLP over PN in a local election with localities tilted in PN’s favour by their obscene manoeuvring to avoid a contest in Labour strongholds of Zejtun and Marsa, leaves no room for any other interpretation.

I would add that this local election result, added to the result of last June’s local and MEP elections, both handsomely won by the MLP barely 15 months after losing the general election of April 2003, should convince the PN that they are in government on borrowed time due to Labour’s mishandling of the EU membership issue and the referendum.

While the message to the PN could not be clearer, the message for the MLP is less evident. Because the MLP has been here before. In the local elections of 2002, in the very same localities as those contested last Saturday but including Marsa and Zejtun, MLP scored a nine per cent point advantage over the PN.

With an election merely 13 months away the MLP fell in a dangerous bout of over-confidence and totally misread the strength of the EU issue in shaping national election voting preferences far differently from local election preferences.

In fact, if one interprets these local election results in a wider context of the performance since the unique events of 1998, which cut short, too short, the life of a democratically-elected Labour government, a curious but very evident trend has taken place.

Interpreting trends requires skills of technical analysis and mathematical regression to establish the correlation over a period of time between distinct factors and to present such correlation in trend lines which could be extended into the future to predict future results on the basis of such correlations.

And the correlation which screams out from the figures of all elections held after that 1998 mind-setting event, is that the Maltese electorate is keen to re-mandate Labour back into national government to continue the aborted mandate of 1996. Labour has won with an increasing margin every election held since that date except for the general election of April 2003 and the referendum and local elections held in March 2003. These are a digression from an otherwise very clear trend-line.

Rather than re-commit the same over-confidence mistake following the local elections of 2002 and assume that the next general election is all but wrapped up, the MLP ought to keep their feet firmly on the ground and read well into this trend line.

Is a pattern being set where the Maltese electorate is happier to share democratic rights by having Labour majorities at local elections and nationalist majorities at general elections? Why is Labour finding it so easy to persuade the electorate at local level and so difficult to win majority support at national level, as shown by the general election of 1998 and the referendum and general election of 2003?

Could it be that while the electorate knows full well that Labour makes better stuff than the fatigued PN who have difficulty in addressing problems they themselves created, the electorate faints and retracts from giving Labour the support it deserves when such support would translate itself in having Alfred Sant again as their prime minister?

Whichever way I try to decipher the local election results, the conviction grows that Alfred Sant’s negative experience as prime minister is becoming a surmountable last barrier between Labour and the next government. The momentum of growth in Labour’s vote is impressive.

Alfred Sant has three years’ grace to prove that he deserves to be re-mandated.

He would do well to re-focus on his pre-1996 vision to re-modernise the country from the prejudices and cobwebs which an expired PN administration keeps spinning in contradictions when speaking with both sides of their mouth.

People are tired of the PN who, while assuring us that all is moving to plan and is under control as the economy brims with confidence of imaginary new investment, the voters’ everyday life unfolds as a continuous struggle with new taxes and cost of living increases that are threatening the standard of living they had taken for granted.

The country badly needs a change of administration.

No government can be popular in the first two-years of a legislature when the hard measures have to be taken, the Prime Minister justified himself to explain why the PN had fared so badly. By the same analogy, voters should remind themselves of the unfairness of judging Dr Sant after less than two years of his term as Prime Minister.

On the other hand, Dr Sant owes it to Labourites and the country to persuade the majority of his merits to be re-mandated as the next Prime Minister by preaching the benefits of his plan rather the unavoidable pain of its measures.

www.alfredmifsud.com