With what shall we compare last week’s election result and all that it means to our people?

There are, in our opinion, two comparables: one local and one foreign.

The local comparable is, of course, the Labour victory in 1996 that ended up with a one-seat majority – and that seat Dom Mintoff. That Labour administration did not last two years.

Before anybody can say that Mintoff is Mintoff and no one else is like him, one has to know the many inside stories of anger, real white-hot anger, felt by those non-elected PN ex-ministers who did not make it, or those ex-ministers who were re-elected but were not re-appointed as ministers or those who had always aspired to be ministers but were not chosen to be so. Apart, of course, from Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, who lied to his prime minister and who almost capsized his own party at the polls and who is still being investigated.

Any or all of these, are potential destablisers, given the right mix of anger, desire for vengeance and not really caring about public opinion.

If anyone thinks he can hold Lawrence Gonzi to ransom, or threaten to bring down the government, let him think again. Had Gonzi given in to one such threat, he would have been engulfed in sleaze and mire.

The foreign comparable is, of course, in the UK, with John Major’s win against all the odds in 1992, when Neil Kinnock thought he was already home and dry and The Sun told everyone to switch off the lights before leaving England. What happened next? Labour chose the most Conservative of its aspiring leaders, Tony Blair, and he won handsomely in 1998, leading to Labour’s 10 years in power.

What Labour did in the UK, it can do in Malta, provided it plays its cards right.

This is all, of course, in the future and still to be seen. What we have is the PN victory on a slimmer scale, a vastly slimmer one, and the resignation of Alfred Sant.

We also have a resurgent Lawrence Gonzi who began the campaign (well, according to some) around 15,000 votes astern of Labour and ended it 1,500 in front. Never has a politician worked so hard as did Dr Gonzi, met so many people, took so many decisions, struggled so hard to get out the last vote and kept smiling, smiling, smiling.

The GonziPN slogan created for him was very much what it was all about, not just, or not simply, to hide the beleaguered ministers behind him, but rather because without the extraordinary effort he put in, the PN vote would have collapsed beyond recognition.

Of course, he ended up battered and wounded, mostly by the allegations regarding what Labour must have thought were the weaker and more vulnerable ministers such as Jesmond Mugliett and Ninu Zammit and, above all, Jeffrey. We said last week that we thought the PN had mishandled the Jeffrey issue and, rather than applauding him, should have immediately censured him, but the election results show that the issue came far too late to affect the vote.

If Lawrence Gonzi was courageous in undertaking a gruelling election campaign when he was still far away from the Labour lead, he was then doubly courageous when it came to appointing ministers. He ruled out those who were tainted and who he had had to defend, against his better judgement, in recent months, he ruled out those with potential conflicts of interest and he also ruled out those whose performance in office left much to be desired.

For all this he is already being knocked – by those who, surprisingly, claim they were part of the winning team when they were in fact among the biggest loss-makers. He has promoted some backbenchers who now have to prove their aspirations were not just hot air. He must now give one and all a far stricter code of ethics and clear policy guidelines as to by what yardstick each appointee will be measured. Things must never again be allowed to fall into the ennui of lost time-lines, cost over-runs and neglected targets.

The 353 campaign pledges must be kept. You don’t start to keep the pledges a year before the next election. Some policy decisions must swing into action immediately – such as SmartMalta, the Grand Harbour plan and also, and above all, let us start with a bang right now to redevelop the Opera House site and to beautify Valletta, cost what it may and hang the controversies, but do something.

On a financial level, people are waiting to see income tax cut, car costs cut, government expenditure cut, the public deficit reduced to nil, and growth, growth, growth. Usually, things slacken off for about six months after an election, as politicians rest from canvassing, ministers choose their staff and then decide what policies to implement. This must not take place: things must start to happen as of now.

There are still a number of questions awaiting a reply and issues that are still unresolved. It is all very well for the government to convert, late as it is, to alternative energy and to spend EUR300 million on the environment, but things must move faster here and deliverables must come fast and furious. On a related issue, Dr Gonzi was wise to clear the tables and cut the bickering and feuding that was going on regarding agriculture, but the government is still very much perceived as being near the secondary sector of tomato processing and wine production and less so to the primary sector, that is to the farmers.

On a parallel issue, it was all very well to have a woman in charge of social policy, and one ought to congratulate Dolores Cristina on her move to education, but it is also about time someone took a long, hard look at social benefit costs (also including health) in view of the widespread social fraud about which no one seems to speak.

The election has brought about the loss, one hopes temporarily, of the services of very valid people, from Louis Galea to Francis Zammit Dimech, from Edwin Vassallo to Gavin Gulia.

There are still posts that need to be filled: the President next year, the Speaker, the European Commissioner, etc., and prematurely retired ministers should not even consider reverting back to much-abandoned pastimes or hobbies.

The election has also brought about the end of Alfred Sant’s leadership of the Labour Party.

In this very sensitive and delicate post-election period, it is difficult to speak about Dr Sant without either allowing past or present emotions to surface or without being perceived as being nice only now that he has gone. It is also too soon to be completely objective and dispassionate about a man who engendered deep loyalties but also deep enmities.

He was, undoubtedly, much sinned against but he must also shoulder responsibility for three election defeats and the defeat at the EU referendum. One can perceive that he had high ethical standards, and his signal contribution was to blunt the violent edge of Labour that still looked like surfacing, had Labour won this time. He was inflexible even when he could have been flexible and, even if the odds were stacked against him, should have tried harder when he met the students, rather than pouring cold stereotyped phrases at them.

If one were to blame the collective Labour leadership, for which they must all now take responsibility, and not just Alfred Sant, they assumed all the way through that their lead was unassailable and they relied too much on the muck-raking of the last week. Throughout the campaign, they continued talking – as this paper has been warning them for months – to their core voters rather than making conscious efforts to build bridges and meet the undecideds. The so-called Labour proposals, from the halving of the surcharge to the reception classes, were half-baked and would have damaged the country. For a party, and a leader, who had spent months talking of the cost of living, their proposals contained nothing much to address this clear issue. No wonder that polls, such as the one by Xarabank that we carry today, consistently showed a generalised lack of credibility of the party and especially its leadership compared to that of Lawrence Gonzi.

It is now up to the Labour Party to choose its leader but perhaps a party is freer to do this when it is already in power, than when it has just lost a key election. By the time the next election comes around, the PN will have been in government for an almost unbroken 25 years and Labour will have lost any touch of the reins of power for so long that it will have begun to tell. Perhaps it has already, despite the PN’s slim victory this time. It, the PN, has graduated from being the party of the middle to upper-middle class to being an all-class party and, unfortunately, as this paper pointed out last Sunday, it is being increasingly looked upon as the party of last-minute give-aways by those who live on the dole, government housing and the like.

Were this paper to give its tuppence of unasked-for advice, it is that there is absolutely no way Labour could ever think the wheel of fortune will turn its way unless it breaks away from its links with the past – and the past is not just Dom Mintoff and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, but now also Alfred Sant. Whether this is at all possible is still to be seen.

Now that the election is over, one also looks forward to less controversial opinions and public discussions. There is an issue here that needs to be tackled as of now: the way the media is structured. The TV media, rather than the print media, is completely undemocratic, with just four TV channels, two of which are owned by the parties. The only way to eliminate the eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation that we have just come out of, is to liberalise and so increase the focal points of public discussion. As things stand right now, we have a classic example of near-monopoly, which breeds further monopolies.

Lawrence Gonzi now has a clear run – as long as no Mintoff surfaces. He must insist on very high ethical standards of public service and on deliverables, deliverables – the very same issues raised by Alfred Sant. The only way to lose the next election will be to lower standards, to indulge in vote-purchasing and to ride roughshod over people’s feelings and opinions.