The local media has, once again, been awash with speculation as to the date of the next general election. Apart from prolonging the state of uncertainty, with its attendant economic consequences, media conjectures serve no practical purposes. A general election is constitutionally due in a matter of months, and the sovereign electorate knows that it will soon be sitting in judgement.

Many have already made up their minds, and the number of “don’t knows” is shrinking fast.

Politicians of all hues will do their damnedest to woo the latter, and to win back those who have deserted them. These politicians will be fighting in the peripheries of the electorate.

But the “heart” of the electorate is set.

Electoral objectives

The average elector will navigate by the star of his or her experience and aspirations.

The number of electors who have been set back by punishing taxation and rising living costs, and those who have been deceived by brazen promises, are older and wiser.

They aspire to change.

Those who have strayed away from the PN fold, and who have repeatedly made manifest their sense of personal betrayal in the past five electoral consultations, will make their presence felt.

It is these two voting categories, plus those who will be voting for the first time on attaining voting age, that are likely to change the contours of the Maltese electoral landscape next time around.

PN game plan

The PN gurus and their strategists are fully aware of this. They are trying hard to move the contest to a different playing field.

They propose to electrify the electorate with “visions” of a splendid future, realisable by 2015. And they seek to alienate the electorate by transforming the election into a presidential race. In this way, electors will be frog-marched into a new form of partisanship: for or against personalities rather than party manifestos.

In the prevailing circumstances, this ploy is too artificial – because the electorate has been bitten far too often and is in distress, rather than twice shy.

The electorate was promised a “New Spring” and a “mini boom” after the last general election. Electors were solemnly assured, as far back as l987, that corruption was to be eradicated “root and branch”. The environment was to “flower” (wicc pajjizna jerga jwarrad). Valletta, Malta’s capital city, was to have its pride restored.

Resentment

In the light of real experience, it is embarrassing to recount this history of broken promises.

Self-respecting electors have every good reason to be enraged, and to react accordingly when some of these past promises are, once more, being refurbished and presented as new, for the Port area and elsewhere.

Democracy thrives on new impetus and change, on initiative that springs from the grass roots of civil society, rather than on so-called “strategy groups” and faceless vested interests.

The electorate knows that times have changed

It rebels at the thought of having to live on a diet of new lies for old.

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