Both Prime Minister and Nationalist Party leader Lawrence Gonzi and party secretary Joe Saliba have made it a point to say, almost every time, that they have spoken publicly over the past days, that people should exercise their right to vote in the coming local council elections.

This is something that the Labour Party does not really insist upon. Leader Alfred Sant regularly says that people should vote Labour because councils led by a Labour mayor have “done better” than those with a Nationalist majority, but calls for people to go to the polls per se have not been so frequent.

The reason for this difference is that past experience has shown that Nationalist supporters are more inclined to not vote in local council elections, whereas Labour supporters do not need to be pushed that hard to cast their preference.

This has helped Labour win the last three local council elections, held in 2004, 2005 and 2006, the first time that one of the parties scored a hat-trick of wins since local council elections started being held in 1993.

What has also helped Labour achieve this feat is the fact that the party is in opposition, and very often, people tend to protest against the administration by not voting in local council elections. It is their way of trying to push the government (read party) they support to do better.

There are other reasons as to why some people choose not to vote. Some may be unhappy with the way their locality is being run. Others do not care much as to who is administering their locality so long as they are seeing an improvement. Others still simply do not bother.

It is agreed that local council elections cannot be compared to a national election, where a decision of much greater significance is taken by the electorate. But local council elections do provide a gauge for the political parties, and the more an election draws near, the more important this measurement will be.

The elections in 22 localities on 10 March will most probably provide the last possibility for all political parties to know where they stand. In all probability, this will be the last test before a general election is called later on this year or early the next, in which case the 2008 local council elections will be linked to the national poll.

This is why the three political parties contesting the March elections are giving them a little bit more weight. The Nationalist Party wants to reverse the trend that has seen it lose three times in succession; the Labour Party wants to build on its success at local level to continue shaping up for what will be the most important examination, the national election; and Alternattiva Demokratika wants to see where it stands before launching its bid to win its ultimate target, a parliamentary seat.

As said earlier, the MLP does not need excessive campaigns to urge its supporters to vote, as most of them will do so anyway. Likewise, Alternattiva Demokratika can rely on its core supporters who will not shy away from expressing their preference. It is the Nationalist Party which needs to call upon its supporters not to show the kind of indifference they demonstrated in local elections held in the past.

What the PN is thinking is that the party cannot really afford a fourth successive defeat, especially if it ends up losing the majority in councils that the party has previously led, as was the case with San Gwann, Pietà, Msida, Mqabba and Santa Venera in the past two years.

The fact that Dr Gonzi and Mr Saliba insisted that party supporters should not ignore local council elections, when they were speaking in Mosta last Sunday, leads one to think that the PN is afraid of losing this locality too, in spite of Mr Saliba saying otherwise.