Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi has made it a point several times to state that the government has not been perfect, but at the same time it has done enough to be given the mandate for another term in office.

He has regularly stated that mistakes have been committed, but that the government should not be punished for the errors of individuals. After all, what is more important is the overall well-being of the country, and in this respect it is clear that today the people are living better than they used to in the past.

Some have described this “apologetic” attitude as an attempt to catch votes or recoup the support of Nationalist people who are disgruntled with the party they have traditionally supported. They say that Dr Gonzi has not been hard on the ministers who have been at the centre of controversies or wrong decisions, and that he defended them when he should have booted them out of the Cabinet.

Still, having a prime minister who acknowledges his government’s mistakes on the eve of an election is not so common. It is, on the whole, a sign of strength. Dr Gonzi knows that errors have been committed, but at the end of the day he knows also that the performance of his government as a whole, the progress made by the country and the several achievements that were registered are far greater than the wrongdoings.

This is a far cry from what happened in other times, when governments that overall performed far worse than the current one, when the mistakes committed were far greater than the ones that have been made in the last legislature and when prime ministers failed miserably in most of what they did never bothered to face the people and admit their mistakes.

Did the Malta Labour Party, for example, apologise to those thousands of young people who did not make it to University because, in their time in government, there was a limit as to the number of people who could join and the few courses that were available did not even open every year?

A political party is accountable to the people, more so when it is in government. And just as much as it (rightly) boasts of the good things that it does, it should have the inner strength to admit where it went wrong. All political parties in general and individual politicians stand to earn more respect if they accept their shortcomings and aim to do better next time round.

And this is why the Malta Labour Party has not come across well when its deputy leader Charles Mangion said that the Nationalists have “something wrong with their DNA”, and neither Dr Mangion, nor MLP leader Alfred Sant, felt the need to admit that it was a slip of the tongue.

What was perhaps worse was that during a televised press conference, in reply to a question on the matter put by The Malta Independent, Dr Sant tried to minimise what had taken place and defended his colleague, even going as far as saying he (Dr Mangion) had said “a different DNA”, when clips shown make it clear that Dr Mangion had used the phrase “something wrong”.

Dr Mangion would have earned more respect if he had apologised for his remark, and Dr Sant would have stood out better had he admitted that a mistake had been committed. If Labour cannot accept they were wrong on matters as trivial as this, then it is no wonder that they do not admit far bigger mistakes made during their time in government.

Saying sorry is not a sign of weakness, as many interpret it to be. Saying sorry is a sign of strength. The person (or political party) who admits doing wrong does so from a position of confidence. On the other hand, a person who does not admit a mistake is more likely to commit others.