From Mr. B Galea

You make a very valid point in your editorial “The other models for Maltese politics” that “the national conundrum is... trying to identify the winner of the next general election” (TMIS, 8 April).

This great preoccupation with who is going to win the election, rather than what they will do once in office, is worse than useless. It wastes a lot of people’s energies, not least press columns, and is almost a permanent national red herring, distracting people from what political debate should actually be about.

This endless gazing into the crystal ball is now seen in the very frequent opinion polls commissioned by almost all newspapers, which the general public has now become accustomed to. Such surveys constantly reveal one very simple and glaring result: half the people questioned do not disclose their voting intentions. The “results” then analysed, ad nauseum, by the press are actually skewed small numbers with substantial error margins and are virtually meaningless once taken out of the context of the huge non-response to surveys.

What can surely be said of the next general election is not too different from other general elections: people will vote at a rate in the mid-90s per cent and the result will be very close. Before every election in Malta, a proportion of people say they are fed up with the two main parties, a point that features strongly, and rightly so, in your editorial, but after months and weeks of intense campaigning, 98-99 per cent of those who cast a valid vote do so for the big parties, one of which gets a clear majority in Parliament.

Recent surveys and local election results show that the third party is getting lower ratings. Thus, the alleged dissatisfaction with the big parties is not translating itself into a show of support for any small party. Surveys actually show that people who are fed up with one of the traditional parties just switch to the other.

The two elections of 1996 and 1998 were very instructive in that the relatively big swings that occurred were purely from one big party to the other, with the smaller party gaining nothing from these swings and actually dropping votes.

Will it be any different next time round? Very unlikely, for the simple reason that the Maltese know who will form the next government: either Dr Lawrence Gonzi or Dr Alfred Sant.

And however partisan the Maltese electorate might be, it votes consistently for strong governments. In more than 50 years and 11 general elections since 1955, only once did small parties make it to Parliament and only because of a specific pre-electoral formal alliance in 1962 (l-umbrella). In 1998, the electorate emphatically voted against weak government.

Rather than talking about who will win a close a race that will be difficult to predict even on the eve, let alone more than a year in advance, what the press should be talking about more readily is what needs to be done in the next five years by whomever occupies the hot seat at Castille .

Do we really want to follow through with the momentous decision that we collectively took in 2003 to join the European Union? Do we want to harness the potential of change? Or do we instead wish to look back, fearing change, falling between two stools, nostalgic for old policies that the electorate has already soundly rejected in the past?

Which choice has the best track record and policies in job-creation, education, the environment, health? Who promises pro-active to prepare our economy in advance to be able to cope with shifts that mostly come from abroad?

Which is the steadiest pair of hands to steer our economy in what will be a period of further change, turbulence perhaps, but also opportunity?

This is what public debate, led by an incisive journalistic class should focus on, rather than peering constantly into the crystal ball as if a general election were a lottery or a game. Journalists should be posing penetrating questions to all politicians and not accepting the vague evasive sounds that seem to have become the stock of many empty vessels.

On a concluding note, I believe it would greatly aid the public at large if journalists strive to broaden their scope outside the very restricted circles of issues (anti-hunting, pro-divorce, anti-construction, global warming, to name but a few and are only a minor portion) that concern and trouble the population.

There are vast thousands of people who dedicate little or none of their day to writing letters or articles to newspapers, attending meetings and keenly scouring the Internet for the latest morsel of news. They carry on with more “mundane” activities. They constitute the vast bulk of the electorate but are generally under-represented in the media. They and their concerns will determine the future of this country more than any “national conundrum”, as you so aptly put it, endlessly debated upon by the press.

Bernard Galea

Balzan