That’s what they want you to think. They want you to think that there is no alternative to the present two-party state of affairs meaning there is no alternative to the present state of affairs.

The tribal division of the country into Reds and Blues has worked in favour of political and social stagnation while risking revolution and possibly worse on the streets every time a regime changes hands.

On some issues we have indeed moved forward: on the issue of ensuring that every vote counts, generally speaking, on the issue of joining Europe, or that of moving towards a full market economy.

But on other issues no change in government has brought about the improvement the people wanted. Three years down the line after EU accession, we have managed to attain the highest level any EU country has of disciplinary action by the EU for not doing what we contracted to do. Three years down the EU line it would be hard to find people to list three aspects on which there has been a sensible improvement – not in the quality of life, not so much in the standard of living, not even in improving the environment, certainly not in how we are preserving what we continually risk losing.

The Labour Party continues to insist that it is inevitable that popular reaction will push power its way. That may certainly happen, but there is a common perception that a sizeable sector of the population does not want to go all that way.

Which the ruling party mistakenly thinks is the solution to its present unpopularity: by insisting that third parties do not work (the trick that worked for them in 2003), people will be forced to vote for a continuation of the present administration. They think.

What people must realise is that it is precisely this that caused and causes the present political and social impasse. A government that is there because there is no viable alternative is a government tempted to think it is eternal; a government that thinks that whatever mistakes it commits will not really matter because it has a divine right to stay in power.

That’s a recipe for mischief. The country has seen Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi progressively losing his grip: a case in point is the case of the two ADT employees kept in employment on “superior orders”, when you have the former CEO sacking the two officials and then resigning after the order was countermanded, followed by the ADT chairman himself stating that neither he nor his board think these people should remain in employment.

And this is a minister who is one of the few who was promoted to ministerial status by Dr Gonzi himself, one of his own creations! Let alone the older war-horses round the Cabinet table.

What is the proper corrective to such goings-on? Vote Labour? Don’t vote at all? The country has come to a point where it is only “consulted” once every five years and then it is a battle of opposites, with two parties heading for an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation, and then, except for the people and personalities involved, much of what they offer is pretty much the same.

Unless the real solution is to break up the two-party state of affairs. The more we get near to election day, whenever that is, the more many people come to understand the solution lies along this way at the cost of moving to a coalition sort of government.

There are, so far, two possible contenders for the role of a third and fourth party: Alternattiva Demokratika, the much-battered and perhaps not always wise, conscientious Green Party also standing for social openness; and whatever some people may say, Azzjoni Nazzjonali, whose leaders may not stand up to public scrutiny for long, and who may be called “as dead as dodos” and racist by the progressive elite, but who are addressing real issues and expressing what many many Maltese are saying in their hearts if not out loud. In nearby Italy, many had reviled Umberto Bossi and his Lega Nord with much the same vituperation but they have made their mark in Italian politics (Josie Muscat is no Umberto Bossi, that’s one problem).

Again, will the moral majority and its deep distrust of Alternattiva on divorce or worse and the squeamish anti-racist elites (why do they not show with action what they say in words – by taking a family or two of illegal immigrants home, or why the fisherman who defied the army and brought the illegals on his tuna net was not made to take them home and host them himself?) force the majority once again to do what the two big parties are not succeeding in doing: consider them and just them as the only real alternatives?