This week – together with the week separating Christmas and the New Year – is probably the laziest of the year. Most politicians, like many other people, take their holidays, spending some time with their families and get a well-deserved rest. This is more so this year which started with an election campaign that lasted three months, and was followed with internal campaigns within the political parties as they held elections to put their administrative structure in place.

This lazy week provides the time for some reflections of what has taken place in the political field since 8 March, the day when the people decided to give the Nationalist Party a third consecutive term in office.

Logic tells you that winning teams stay in place, and losing teams are changed. But this is not what happened in the Nationalist and Labour parties this year.

The Nationalist Party won the election, its third victory in a row. Lawrence Gonzi and Tonio Borg remained as leader and deputy leader of the party, and this was somewhat expected considering that they had taken over the party’s reins just over four years ago. A new leader who takes his party to a third victory is bound to stay on, after all.

But the PN looked at things in a wider perspective, and more importantly, with the next election already in mind. They therefore took the opportunity to renew itself from within, changing top people within its administration to practically start anew. The Nationalists will be facing the polls next time round with a new administration.

In particular, the post of secretary general, which is more or less equivalent to that of a chief executive officer in a private company, went from Joe Saliba, who called it quits after such a successful time, to Paul Borg Olivier.

This and other internal changes will bring in fresh ideas and a renewed enthusiasm in a party that has been in office for the good part of two decades, and knows how hard it will be to convince the people to vote it in government again in five years time.

On the other side of the political fence, it was realised that change was needed for the party to rejuvenate itself.

And the Malta Labour Party, stunned as it was after the election defeat, seemed heading in the right direction when Alfred Sant resigned and a race ensued to replace him. Although surveys showed that neutral voters would have preferred George Abela to win the leadership contest, the election of Joseph Muscat was still considered to be a positive move for a party that wanted to move away from its recent past and give itself a better chance to beat the PN in 2013.

Yet, the choices that were made afterwards did not follow up the decision to elect him. The same delegates who put Dr Muscat as leader of their party voted in two deputies – Anglu Farrugia and Toni Abela – who do little to portray an image of novelty. If anything, they reminded many of the 1980s days that the Labour Party has gone to great lengths to make the people forget.

It was not the end because the party administration, which should carry a lot of the blame for the election defeat, was re-installed almost in full. The three top positions in the party structure stayed the same as they were before March – with Jason Micallef, himself the target of so many accusations from within the party, retaining the post of secretary general.

The irony of the whole situation is that whereas the Nationalist Party, in government, will be facing the electorate with a new party set-up, the Labour Party, in opposition, will be going for the elections with the same administration that led it to a defeat.