The new US administration is faced with two stark challenges. The first challenge is to relaunch the US economy in order to get the industrialised world out of recession. The second daunting task is to abandon unilateralism and join forces with the leading industrial nations in order to reform the international institutions – primarily to stop nuclear proliferation, especially in the Middle East.

This new course of the industrialised countries is then to be directed to the third world, which as a reaction to the excesses of neo-liberalism became easy prey to the pull of all sorts of dictatorial regimes or where a power vacuum resulted – to the lure of religious fundamentalists.

These developments in international relations, which may be described as nothing less than revolutionary, call for a realignment of the political forces also in Malta.

Such a realignment is already evident in the trade union sector where after 50 years of bipolarism (GWU-CMTU), the industrial scene is developing into a three-way division (GWU – CMTU – FORUM). Such a development makes it possible to supersede the policy of confrontation between trade union movements – which is detrimental to the interests of workers – and make way to a policy of constructive dialogue and engagement among these federations.

A realignment of the political forces in Malta would curtail the use of rhetoric by party leaders who in order to cement the cracks within their ranks project an image of the other party as the enemy. Malta – as much as the rest of the world – has to face the dire consequences of economic recession and political disintegration and so has to be ready to abandon the road of partisanship and confrontation of the past years and pursue a policy of dialogue between the political forces and for a start this could be initiated in the broadcasting field.

Such a policy is not beyond us and although it could not be said that it was ever reached in all its fullness at any particular time, it is a fact that at certain times prior to the introduction of pluralism in broadcasting in the early 1990s a certain element of dialogue between the political parties existed. To my mind the system of broadcasting introduced in the early 1990s has exasperated political division within the country and ways and means are to found to mitigate this division.

The political parties are not simply there to incubate programmes as such, which they propagate prior to elections as a massive PR exercise. They are also to consider the attendant conditions prevailing in the country and how these conditions will impact their programmes.

It is a commonplace to say that it has now become a practice for politicians to consider the people factor mainly in order to obtain their vote in elections. Even if other methods are also extensively used to gather information about public opinion – the end result is the same, this is a top-down approach – a technocratic approach – which has landed us in the worst financial and economic crisis of the past hundred years.

To get out of this mess a different approach has to be used. A different but not an opposite approach. Simply the discarding of technocracy, which will result in a populist / everyman’s approach is not the answer to the needs of complicated societies in which we are living.

The new approach is to integrate the technocratic approach with genuine participation and involvement of all stakeholders. This in my opinion can only be achieved with a realignment of the political forces in Malta and the shedding away of the certainties of the past which were more ideological than real.

Mario Mifsud

Hamrun