As Malta moves closer to the run-in to the next general elections, will the Maltese electorate send out a signal that enough is enough, and resolve to challenge its politicians, some of whom have proved to be irresponsible and assume to be irremovable?

At the last general elections, the Nationalist Party won the contest but lost the argument. Has it got enough time left to summon the resilience and buoyancy it displayed in the past? Will the PN painters of political horror scenarios rally the stray sheep, simply by concocting horror stories about the socialist bogey-man? And will the Labour Party make a dent in its public imagination in the next few months?

These are vital questions which the respective party machines, and their propaganda subsidiaries, should tackle in their own interest.

The past decade or so has been an age of longing and an age of disillusion. The loss of high aspirations, stimulated by partisan propaganda, is a process of wear and tear. Has the process of erosion reached a stage advanced enough to generate a longing for recovered pride?

The Maltese elector is a social and moral being. He is not a speck on a sandy beach and his history is not a dance of dust stirred by a vacuum cleaner. The chemistry of his reasoning, the algebra of his heredity, the switchboard mechanism of his brain are not the be-all and end-all of his being. There are such things as his thirst for justice and his hungering after dignity.

Survival instinct

There is such a thing as reason and there is the call of conscience. Above all, there is his survival instinct in play.

The Maltese elector has to be studied as a whole. He will respond to the politicians who, instead of playing God, and making poetry out of political slogans, will hold forth the promise of reconstructing on the crumbling ruins around him.

This is not the right time and place to relate how the Maltese environment has been, and is still being, raped by rapacious speculators, how the environment has been steadily contaminated under the nose, if not with the deliberate consent, of constituted regulatory authorities.

Neither is it the right time and place to explain how and why the Maltese electorate has been set back en masse during the past decade under the weight of rising taxation and an unprecedented national debt.

It is sufficient to highlight the stark reality that, for more than a decade, Malta launched a money no problem programme and lived the life of Riley, well beyond its means. The challenge is to take stock of the harm done and to remedy matters on fair terms.

Social injustice

On accession to the European Union, the government was obliged by Brussels to conform to the Maastricht criteria and introduced a so-called convergence programme.

Some convergence there has been although the government continues to overspend.

Such convergence as there has been has been implemented at the expense of the less well-to-do, instead of the other way round. New austerity measures were evenly spread without due regard to social justice.

The Government did not lead by example – by imposing austerity measures in the use of Ministerial transport and entertainment expenses for a start.

It did not impose, a priori, any tax on ostentatious expenditure e.g. on yachts, private swimming pools, expensive high-powered cars or jewellery.

This mix of social injustice and economic incompetence led, inevitably, first to crisis point, and then to ultimate stringency and austerity.

Spending power dried up, So did the market. The business sector immediately felt the pinch.

There were factory and hotel closures. Unemployment peaked. The economy could not shake off its fatigue.

All the indicators show that Malta’s performance led to low placings in the European Union League tables.

The challenge is to break the chain of incompetence, procrastination and mismanagement that suffocated Malta’s development.

Is this not the right time to get rid of the dead wood, and for the political class to provide more room for the meritocracy and for civil society to have a recognised presence and a say in the affairs of the state?

One thing is certain. The Prime Minister courts disaster if the same tired hands are allowed to continue to run sensitive Ministries any longer.

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