The absence of parliamentary sittings to liven up political debate does not mean that politics has taken a holiday. Nor will the absence of the Prime Minister (who flies to Australia today). Nor any holiday the Leader of the Opposition may choose to take.

This is pre-election summer and politics does not take holidays.

There is the usual hyping-up of issues, real or imagined, and there is also, unfortunately, the usual attempt to blacken the other side through innuendo, guilt-by-association and downright slander.

So far, so par for the course.

Yet one poll after another shows no clear winner emerging, no clear trend visible. The Don’t Knows remains, by far, the biggest party on the island. It’s like most people are sitting down, listening and pondering, pondering and listening, waiting for the real issues to emerge to find out where they stand.

The Labour Party, strong in its core supporters and with the underlying current of alternation pulling its way, thinks this is its chance. Yet its core support barely moves in the polls, suggesting once again it is still talking to its core and has not broken any new ground.

The Nationalist Party still finds itself the weaker of the two and has seen its core support slowly decreasing, with some rare peaks along the way followed by awesome slides to further lower levels.

The other party, now augmented by the fourth, still show no sign of making their mark on the electorate as a whole.

The real third party is the Don’t Knows.

Once again, the whole country is deep in the throes of introspection, as a general election offers the country as a whole and its constituent parts as well, the opportunity to re-examine the whole cultural set-up that makes up the country and to decide which way forward will it be.

In the end, it may well end up moving retro, like other times in recent history, the country plunging into hold, or even retrenching, or shying away from further adventures. It may also be that the country becomes influenced by this or that spin, which has no real bearing on the real issues.

The opportunity is there, however, to re-examine the whole basis of the country, the way the country perceives itself. The coming election could be, though one doubts it, an opportunity to create a new majority in the country, far removed from the tribal ways of two parties, one red, one blue.

But even if it does not go that far, the coming election could serve as an opportunity to re-assess and re-examine the way we do politics in this new EU member State that is Malta. And such reflection could perhaps lead, who knows?, to a more mature way of looking at politics, of doing politics.

The political issue of these summer days focuses on politics and politicians. Or rather, to be more precise, on what politicians do when they are not politicians. They work, obviously, and they mainly find their natural roles as intermediaries – lawyers, doctors, architects, and so on. They deal with people on a professional basis and through this they build up their constituency support. Whatever the myths repeated ad nauseam about rights, not privileges, what counts in the end are the personal contacts, the house visits, the constituency surgeries, in which each and every visitor demands just one thing: a pjacir (favour), something that cannot be obtained on a level playing field. We defy any politician on the island to deny this.

Until now, this system has served us well. Having part-time politicians who did something else during the day helped shore up the system without bankrupting us. And it also helped politicians to meet people and tackle real people issues.

Of course, in an island where people wear multiple hats most of the time, borders and clear-cut definitions were smudged and lost. The most recent cases such as at ADT, at MMA, at MEPA, and in and around Parliament, have all brought to the fore this dilemma: can an MP be an intermediary? Or can conflicts of interest be removed?

In this edition of this newspaper such questions are asked: Can a government MP act as lawyer in defence of people accused of undermining good governance through corruption? In past years, today’s Opposition tried to impose on its lawyer MPs a prohibition not to defend people brought up on drug charges. Such a policy could not work, however morally upright it may have been, and in fact, it did not work. Can the State employ as an official a person who has come out as a possible candidate for a political party? (Let alone the fact that this has happened with regard to the party in Opposition and the man in question was not removed).

More such questions spring to mind: How many MPs tend to include spin-offs from their professional careers in the way they ask questions or make statements in the House, in the way they many times neglect to disclose their other interest?

There will most probably not be an answer to such questions and, years hence, we may well find ourselves still struggling against these delimiting parameters. Still, in an election year when issues seem to be rather rare, discussing such issues may well broaden the national perspective and, who knows?, maybe also help us change the way we do things.