Do the results of these local elections show above all that Alfred Sant was right that we should keep politics out of local councils? That although local councils have been a good thing, and there have been many exemplary mayors and councillors (and a lot of mediocrity too!)... this over-politicized island needed political parties working at local level like a hole in the head?

As Labour whoops with delight at another win, and an even sweeter win because they managed to challenge the Nationalist Party in PN heartlands, the PN have to grin and bear a result that was perhaps as bad as Dar Centrali had feared, and the PN is only partly able to console itself that this is only a local election.

But should a local council election be a colourful battle of red versus blue with a flash of green, a political poll above all else, or should it be a reflection of how hard a council, and the individuals which make it up particularly, has worked for its locality?

We didn’t really need this poll to know people are very fed up with many years of PN government with certain basics not improving. Do we need to colour our localities with politics too? Aren’t our localities tribalised enough by different parishes, band clubs, streets perceived as better than others, different cliques, class differences, people’s sporting preferences, historic familial rivalries and the like?

Does politics per se add value to a local council? If you consider the enormous number who stayed at home, and an equally enormous number who did go out to vote because they felt they should (or felt pressurised to do so) but fundamentally also didn’t really want to vote because they are equally annoyed with the government of the day, you really have an absolute majority who are not voting on local issues at all, but are sort of voting in or out the government of the day! That was hardly why local councils were created or was it?

So many, many PN people did what they said they would do, and stayed at home. But do these results show that while local democracy is in principle a good thing, this instinctive small island’s urge to tribalise everything in these islands means we should have tried harder to leave politics out of it, and tried instead to ensure that those who we vote into local councils had their locality’s good at stake, more than their political rivalry and ambitions?

What really is the point of these hugely expensive opinion polls every year?

Why can’t we just vote for local councils every five years as we do in general elections? Why can’t we vote for people who just want to work for the good of their locality instead of representing a political party?

Why do we put local councillors in the intolerable position of having to choose between their allegiance to a political party or the wishes of the residents of the locality? Nowhere was this dilemma clearer than in Sliema, where it was very difficult for the PN councillors to come out and say they disagreed with this whole car park thing, instead of trying to find ways to appear to be on the residents’ side and on the government’s side.

You can’t be on both sides and the drop in votes showed.

The drop in votes was spectacular. If you compare 2006 to 2003, almost 20 per cent less voted in Cospicua, more than 20 per cent in Lija, almost 30 per cent less in San Gwann, and close to those numbers again in Naxxar and in Sliema.

Politics in modern Malta has always been about one tribe versus another getting, or perceived to be getting, all the goodies. Now we have created local councils, people are going to use the vote in these local council elections in the way they have been badly trained to do. We don’t educate people to vote for values and principles, we train them to vote on colour and they do.

Now on local councils they don’t vote for the good of their locality as they should; they vote to send a political message, whether they bother to go out to vote or not.

Alfred Sant has been proved right. It is impossible to remove party politics from our system of democracy in terms of central government, but we certainly need to do so locally because political opinion polls were not why local councils were set up in the first place. We are sowing what we reaped and we should correct this before it is too late and voter apathy really sets in.