Local political observers who keep their ears to the ground can now distinctly hear the distant rumbling of an electoral storm. Before the clouds gather, and the real storm breaks, the electoral sky will be illuminated by approaching thunder with increasing frequency.

Politicians will begin to switch from a low profile to bigger-than-life proportions. The party machines will hum busily. The electorate will begin to concentrate its mind amid distractions and dollops of false propaganda.

Electoral campaigns bring with them spectacle as well as excitement. They can also leave disillusionment in their wake. But events have yet to blossom and unfold.

It is up to the Prime Minister to decide on the date of dissolution and the next election date. The media pundits hazard their guesses, and seem to focus on September/October next year (2007).

In a world of fast moving developments, unexpected scenarios cannot be ruled out.

As of this moment, MPs are looking forward to the summer recess. They should well relish it. Once the Prime Minister fires the first salvo, political parties and individual politicians are expected to throw their weight into the fray.

The electoral mood

At election time, politicians bid the electorate to look to the future.

The electoral mood, this time round, is to see Malta shaking itself out of its present mood of depression, as a matter of priority. It is painfully conscious that the flowers in the Maltese garden are wilting, and that the immediate challenge facing Malta is to give sinews to the economy.

During the more recent years, Malta was driving in reverse along the avenue of history. The government was “flying without instruments”. Malta was mired in a nightmare of stagnant growth and political ineptitude.

The electorate is in a position to base itself on the cool appraisal of observable

phenomena. It knows how much it has been set back

by taxation and rising costs, and how the economy

could not take off and catch up with the pace of its EU partners.

Free societies in general and democracies in particular do not founder or lose the momentum of progress because they are strong, but only when they are weak, indecisive, inefficient, corrupt or unjust.

Central issue

The central and pressing issue at the next election is why Malta lost economic momentum after long years of PN governance, and how it can cross the threshold that leads to survival.

By now, public opinion has had time to scrutinise the formula that pinned it down. It had to do with big government and the spending that goes with it.

The national exchequer was overloaded to breaking point. The bureaucracy multiplied. Quangos proliferated. Market fatigue developed into progressive exhaustion. The economy survived on borrowed money. Unemployment reached record levels. Control of public expenditure was primitive and grossly inadequate, with the Office of the Accountant General trying to mop up the damage a year after the event.

Big government has become a problem for our island State. The electorate would like nothing better than the certainty that, in future, it is the dog (the government) that wags its tail and not vice-versa.

If this will be the predominant electoral preoccupation this time round, the ruling administration will find itself with its back to the wall, because Yesterday’s Men persisted, and continue to persist, in their unwillingness to expiate their sins.

The Day of Reckoning is getting closer.

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