It was another weekend of success for the Malta Labour Party. The party has now won the last four local council elections, and added to the victory in the European Parliament polls, has won the last five electoral tests.
If, as many are predicting, last Saturday’s local elections were the last that will be held before Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi calls a general election, then Labour will have won all that there is to win between the 2003 election and the next one.
And this is the big task that Labour has ahead of them, as it plans to face the entire electorate when the time comes for a national election.
Because it will all have been in vain if the MLP, having won all the elections at local level, then proceeds to lose the general election. It would be like the football team that handsomely wins all its matches in a competition – as the MLP has handsomely won all the local council elections since 2004 – but then goes on to lose the final.
And this is why the MLP must translate the euphoria it has enjoyed over the last few years, and again last weekend, into more energy to continue persuading the people that it can be a better government.
Dr Alfred Sant and his team know this. They know that local elections can never be put on the same wavelength as a national poll. They know that there are people who use local elections to send a message to the government by voting for other parties or by not voting at all. They know that there are many who are indifferent to what happens in their locality and simply do not bother to pick up their voting document.
This will all change in a national election, when so much more is at stake. In Malta, we are used to having more than 90 per cent of the electorate casting his or her preference at national level, which is much more than the 68 per cent that did so last Saturday.
As reported in The Malta Independent yesterday, in the last three rounds of local council elections, at which every citizen of this country had the opportunity to vote, more than one third of the electorate chose to stay at home.
That meant that over 100,000 voters decided not to exercise their right to vote in a local council election, and this is a large chunk of people, more so considering that it is normal for national elections in Malta to swing one side or the other by a few thousand votes.
It is precisely this that pushes Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi to still believe that the Nationalist Party will win the election. And it is precisely this that the MLP must keep very much in mind as it prepares for the general election.
It is one thing winning at local level, and another thing winning at national level. Dr Sant does his best to ride on his party’s recent successes and insist that what has taken place in the last few years is a clear indication that the people want a change of government. But Dr Sant knows that a general election can be a different story.
Labour have built up a strong base at local level, and now have a majority in 40 of the 68 local councils. At face value, this would be tantamount to a big win for the party in national terms, but the scenario changes completely when one talks about a general election.
The MLP has managed to persuade people to give it a chance at local level. What it must now work hard at is trying to convince the people that it will be a better government. It must not only point
fingers at the government’s weaknesses, but must also expose its own strengths, those strengths that could push the electorate to vote Labour when the time comes.