Local Does not mean national

Malta Independent Thursday, 16 March 2006, 00:00 Last update: about 14 years ago

I am glad to see that voter turnout was so low in this last round of local council elections. I’m not being perverse or facetious; I’m just being sensible. It’s about time we stopped going nuts over something as insignificant as whether the local councils of Fgura or Fontana have a majority of Labour or Nationalist councillors.

It doesn’t make a difference to anyone’s daily life, except perhaps that of the councillors themselves, who get to feel important. Think hard: does it really make a difference to you whether your local council is predominantly Labour or Nationalist? Of course it doesn’t.

The only reason anyone cares at all is the good old sense of one-upmanship, the sort that makes some people think of politics as a competitive sport. Well, I’m not like that, and from what I see and hear, fewer and fewer people are. Local councils matter not a jot in the scheme of things, and taken out of the “great political game”, they matter even less.

I have felt that way about them from the word “go”. I try to come up with ways in which they have made people’s lives better, and I can’t. I have to work hard to persuade myself that they haven’t actually made our lives worse, because at first analysis, that’s exactly what it seems like.

What, after all, is the single greatest manifestation of local councils? It is local wardens, and they are making things more difficult for us by the day. They sneak around, ready to pounce. They hide behind corners until you park on a double-yellow line to rush across the street, and then they run out brandishing their ticketing weapons.

They ceaselessly prowl the streets, not to protect the citizens from crime and harassment, but to mete out as many tickets as possible. It is not in their interest that we all behave and park and drive correctly, because that would mean no money. The worse we behave, the richer the local councils get. The better we behave, the poorer they are.

The streets are still dirty, the roads are worse than they ever were (but not as bad as they will be next year), nothing works as it should, roads and squares are ripped up in the core of the larger towns, causing chaos for weeks if not months, the rubbish collection system is less efficient than it was 15 years ago, the flowering plants so enthusiastically put down in the early years have long since withered and died, and meanwhile, our councillors sit around and hold nitpicking sessions as to the low-brow version of how many angels can turn on the head of a pin.

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The Labour Party is thrilled because it “won a landslide” in the local council elections. The logic of this statement, repeated ad nauseam in the newspapers, defeats me. I thought the whole point of local councils is that they are local, not national – hence the inability of any party to win, by a landslide or otherwise, on a national basis.

If you can call a two-councillor Labour majority in the local council of Hamrun (or wherever) a landslide, then so be it – but that would make you the possessor of a Lilliputian mentality to chime with the Lilliputian reality into which you were born. May I scream this loudly, please?

If a council is local, then its election is local, too. The fact that the election of many local councils takes place on the same day does not make those elections a national event. They remain local – the business of Mosta, Hamrun, Sliema, Fontana, Gharb or wherever.

The national hysteria that surrounds these elections, with the political parties pulling out all the campaigning stops, does no good at all. It’s neurotic and nauseating. It’s about time more of us learned how to ignore the parties when they begin to campaign, and treat these local elections like the petty, insignificant events that they are, reminding ourselves that it doesn’t make one jot of a difference whether the mayor is Labour or Nationalist.

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The Labour Party should know that the cock who crows too soon ends up in the pot. Look what happened to Alternattiva Demokratika. A couple of years ago, because of the 20,000 votes obtained by Arnold Cassola in the MEP elections, it thought it had grown big enough to hold the government and the opposition to ransom.

There were lots of trumpeting and boastful articles in the newspapers, and lots of smug remarks by neo-Greens at cocktail parties. Yet, its local council election vote has been shrinking steadily, and reached an all-time low last Saturday.

Look, too, at what happened to the Nationalist Party, in 1996. Few political incumbents bothered to clear their desks on the Friday before election day, having taken it for granted that they would be back to work on the Monday. Well, what a shock that was. And look what happened to all those who believed the Opposition Leader when he said that “partnership” would win the referendum. He was so convinced of it himself that he was still claiming victory long after the ballot papers were counted and the “Yes” vote was home and dry. Now that was embarrassing.

It is even less wise to see a national victory based on individual wins at local council level, two years ahead of the big game, on such a low voter turnout and when you know that your supporters have rushed out to vote because they are determined to experience their day on the stage under the spotlight, while almost everyone else stayed home.

The fact that they stayed home on Saturday, or went out to enjoy themselves far away from polling-booths and the television news, does not mean that they are going to stay away when the prospect of a government led by Alfred Sant is standing at the front door. There are few things that motivate people to vote more than the prospect of a change of government from one they don’t like to one they like even less.

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You win a national election when you win a national election. The cat’s in the bag when the cat’s in the bag, and not when it’s running around howling for supper. Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. The higher you climb, the harder you fall. Hubris leads to nemesis. Why did the chicken cross the road? Because he thought he’d already won the election. Shall I go on? Better not.

* * *

People are sick of the eternal Playstation game called Maltese Partisan Politics. It stinks of the past more than ever, now that anyone who wants to do so can escape to the great wide yonder. Despite the best efforts of the authorities to keep us here by slapping ever higher airport and departure taxes on those who try to leave, we are Lilliput no longer, and the antics of our Lilliputian parliament have never seemed less interesting. They are like a belated sequel to Gulliver’s Travels. The only divorce we have here is the divorce of our politicians from reality.

All we want is the roads fixed and to be able to heat our homes without taking out a bank loan to pay for it. We want to be able to leave our homes without being pounced on by a man or woman in green. We want to be able to pick up a newspaper or tune in to the news without getting that awful sense of déjà vu, that we have been reading and listening to the same things for much of the past 20 years.

The mistake that the Labour Party makes is in thinking that the change we want is political change. It’s not. It’s cultural. We are as sick of each other as we are of the people who run the country. We have been living in each other’s pockets for far too long. Marriages are breaking down all over the place and people are backbiting each other like there’s no tomorrow because we have become so very nervous, living like 400,000 ferrets tied up in a sack.

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Most of us have reached the stage where we don’t even care who’s in government. We just want to live, for a change, in a country where things work, and where you don’t cause Lm800 worth of damage to your car just by driving to work and back.

All this government has to do to win the next election is give us the kind of roads that people in civilised countries have been driving on for 50 years. Perhaps the government doesn’t believe me, but it should. This single issue looms larger in the public consciousness than anything else: larger than pensions, larger than the euro, larger than the deficit. We come face to face with it every day and it’s a huge contributing factor to national tension.

But of course, new roads are a tall order because all the roads have been neglected for so long that they are falling to bits. Some of them have never even been made. They are dust-tracks like something from the worst part of the “occupied territories.”

The few attempts that have been made at building new roads have been so prolonged and inept that the thought of a road-building programme run by a Maltese government strikes fear into the hearts of us all. In the length of time it took the government to rebuild the road between Burmarrad and Targa Gap, a distance of one kilometre, NASA developed the space shuttle.

In front of the church in Mosta, a job that might have taken 48 hours in Germany, with teams working day and night in fluorescent jackets under floodlights, is turning into a weeks-long circus act, with dormant machinery and disappearing workmen, that threatens to go on for months. Meanwhile, all traffic through Mosta is either barred or diverted through narrow alleys and side-streets. It is because of things like this that people are so fed up. We’ve lost hope that anything will ever change.

Page 7

Leader

The silent vote

One third of those who were eligible to vote in last Saturday’s local council elections did not do so.

Turnout in these elections is high in Malta when compared to turnout in other countries, but it is much lower than that in a general election when over 90 per cent of the voters in this country turn out to vote.

When local council elections were linked to other polls – such as the referendum on European Union membership and the election for Malta’s representatives in the European Parliament – voter turnout was much higher and closer to the trend in national elections.

On their own, local councils elections have always attracted just two-thirds or thereabouts of the voting population.

There are various reasons why people choose not to exercise their right to vote in local council elections.

First, some people just could not be bothered who is elected to represent them on the locality’s council. Whether it is a Nationalist or Labour-led council does not make that much of a difference, these people seem to think. There is only so much that local councils can do.

Second, there are many residents who believe that their local councils have not done much for the town or village – or else they are not making a decent effort to do so. Local councils might have improved a few roads and embellished a town’s mains areas, but at the end of the day, there are councils that have not delivered over successive terms.

If people feel that their council has not lived up to their expectations and see that the list of candidates for the election is largely made up of councillors who are not up to standard, they might choose not to vote because they know that the situation will not change.

Third, many people also believe that local councils have become another “mini-Malta”, in the sense that partisan politics in the locality make it nearly impossible for things to change. Whether it is a Nationalist or Labour majority, the “opposition” puts the spokes in the wheels and does its utmost to put the “majority” councillors in bad light.

Minorities in councils have every interest to slow down the work of the council and to lead residents into believing that little or nothing is being done. This is perhaps one of the reasons why the presence of political parties in local councils does not help. If councillors did not represent political parties, local councils would be able to achieve more than they have to date.

Local issues that have become political footballs hinder any progress that would be of benefit to the residents and it does little to encourage people to turn up at the polling booth on election day.

Fourth, residents believe that by not voting they are sending a message to the political parties or the government. Some people would never dream of voting for the “opposing party” or a third party, not even on a local council level, but they still want to punish the political party they traditionally support and show the party they are not happy with the way things are being administered.

Although their concerns are local, in many cases the people’s decision not to vote is based on national issues.

Generally speaking, and the results of the past elections are proof of this, there have been many Nationalist supporters who did not cast their vote to push their party to make changes which they deem necessary both for the country to move forward and for their own personal life to improve.

Whether these non-voters will do the same and send the same message in a general election is debatable, and many tend to think that this is highly unlikely.