Rural Affairs and Environment Minister George Pullicino hit the nail on the head during one of his interventions on the PBS programme Xarabank last Friday.

Mr Pullicino said that politicians sometimes fail to see the overall picture because they tend to take more notice of the few people that hound them. The perception they create of what is going on around them is therefore distorted.

This is what The Malta Independent has been writing about regularly over the past months. Finally, a politician has admitted that it is true.

There is a silent majority out there that does not go to a politician’s office or give him a ring to voice their concerns or to disagree with what the minister or the government is doing. There is a silent majority that does not think it is right to turn up at every political activity in the hope of shaking a minister’s hand. There is a silent majority that keeps mum in the five years between one election and another, but then is able to analyse the situation, form an opinion and make a choice.

And this is where politicians and political parties seem to fail. They tend to give undue importance to those people who surround them all the time, those who will vote for the party they have always supported no matter what, and at the same time ignore those people who swing from one party to another depending on the circumstances.

Whether these “circumstances” are personal or national is another matter, but the point is that political parties are still ingrained in the old way of catering for their diehard supporters without showing any attention to those who are fed up of the way local politics is handled.

The parties’ respective media does not help at all. We are not living in heaven as NET TV would like us to believe; neither are we living in hell as One TV wants us to think. Politicians at either end unfortunately seem to follow this line of thinking too.

The fact that there is so much in between what the PN and the MLP are saying does not seem to bother either. Neither does it bother both parties that the number of people who are no longer attached to a political party but prefer to make up their mind depending on the “circumstances” mentioned earlier is growing.

Last month, The Malta Independent had called these people “the purple party”, a party that is growing every day and which will determine the outcome of the next election. Yet it is a “party” that is completely ignored by both the PN and the MLP, in spite of the fact that they should ultimately concentrate all their efforts on these people to be given the power to govern.

The diehards will always vote for the party they have backed for many years, and will not change their ways. Of course, parties believe they should be nurtured too, but this should not be done at the expense of the others, those that will inevitably swing an election one way or the other.

It is this that political parties and their media fail to understand. There are people with Nationalist leanings who might be tempted to vote Labour next time, but all it takes for them to “go back” to the PN is to tune in to a One TV news bulletin. Likewise for people with Labour leanings who might be thinking of voting PN – watching a Net TV bulletin is enough to make them change their mind.

Politicians (and their media) should learn to be more objective in their views. What is wrong is wrong and any number of excuses will not make it look good. Admitting one’s mistakes might be unnatural for a politician, but at the end of the day he or she gains more credibility.