Election results effectively help to bury old issues quicker than filling out your ballot paper. Last week’s EP elections left no one in doubt about Labour’s well-earned European credentials, though the issue was already a false one from the very start. The party’s stance, even in pre-referendum days, had always been that Labour believed in Malta’s European status and that the issue of EU membership was more a question of timing than anything else.

The Nationalists, of course, would not have it. Not only do they think that, like the kings and queens of ancient times, they have a divine right to govern these islands, but they wanted to be seen as the one and only pro-European party. Much to their surprise and undisguised horror, the bubble burst five years ago with the very first EP election in Malta and Gozo, which Labour, still reeling from a referendum and general election shock, won handsomely.

If the people spoke five years ago, this time round they chose to scream out their conviction that Labour is genuinely seeking to remain true to its promise that the democratic “yes” choice of EU membership will be respected and even taken advantage of. No politician who expects to be taken seriously can, ever again, proclaim Labour as anti-Europe. The issue is now buried in the Gonzi graveyard.

Happily, however, there will always be eurosceptics ready to pounce on every wrong move by Brussels. Some of them actually do it from inside the European Parliament itself, which goes a long way to confirm once and for all that European society stands to gain from this healthy exercise. It is what keeps both bureaucrats and politicians on their toes.

21st century politics are in fact tuned to act in this burying process. It is why both the Right and the Left have moved towards the centre where a conglomeration of ideas and ideals create a massive political spaghetti junction out of which springs the odd fanatic and extremist, as we have seen with the BNP in the UK elections and BNP-like parties in other “usually moderate” stomping grounds all over Europe.

A few years ago, a Maltese university professor was rightly taken to task when he claimed that ideologies were dead. He was quickly reminded that even saying so was, in itself, an ideology. Ideologies are not issues; you cannot bury them or have them exhumed from time to time. They are based on principles, on natural political instincts, and though they do get a varnish here and there every now and then, they remain intact, re-used, updated and re-polished, always depending on the prevailing season.

Issues, on the other hand, belong to the day’s agenda. As a result, long-perceived profiles have changed and inter-changed over the decades. The Nationalist Party once had the symbolic black of fascism inserted into its official emblem; today it thinks strictly in blue terms. When it had always been quick to criticise Labour’s May Day manifestations, and in the process comically creating a “communist” issue of it all, there came the day when it too wanted to woo the workers by celebrating the day.

Other time-honoured issues often linked with the Left, like trade union involvement in politics and a quasi-military discipline for the faithful, were also taken on by the Nationalist bandwagon of the 1980s.

Labour too has had to adapt and adopt. It can no longer make an exclusive issue of its working class qualifications. Though it has fairly retained its ongoing defence of the sector that originally gave birth to it, the Labour Party is publicly seen today as a growing movement of different progressive political and social interests, very much in the mould of the Orange Revolutions of Eastern Europe.

So while issues are buried, new and unlikely coalitions take form to serve the moment as the wide spectrum of people and ideologies grow even wider. Traditional allies of the conservative party like the self-employed, find they can achieve more political grit within the progressive movement. The same goes for traditional middle-class voters who have likewise discovered they have been sold to the knackers while the governing party seeks to over-feed the hungry beasts made up of developers and monopolists who, in return, keep its coffers plentiful.

These are heady days, full of rapture and innuendo. That a party that has achieved an emphatic absolute majority should almost end up with the same number of parliamentary seats as the party that was swept off the carpet, is, by whichever European standards you gauge it, a farcical reality. But then, for three government MPs reportedly voting exclusively for candidates from the Opposition is also a highly intriguing development that may cause Prime Minister Gonzi a few sleepless nights.

Has this EP election buried once and for all the issue of small parties in Malta? I honestly hope not. Small parties have a role to play in a society where two big parties rule the roost as they maintain their perennial tug-of-war in search of power. Small parties however, need to realise that coalitions are the only avenue left for them to anything worth their while. The Greens, despite their initial local allegiances that were bluntly and obscenely sledgehammered on the eve of recent elections, are perceived as a progressive element, in contrast to other small groups that thrive on extreme political themes.

You are a nation of politicians, one European socialist told a Labour mass gathering the other day. He could not be more right. Malta’s progressives were practically the only one such movement to make electoral headway last week. The Maltese tend to be politically shrewder and certainly more alert than their European brethren. How else can one explain such lessons of history as minuscule Malta being one of the first British colonies to claim and obtain self-government, the first in Western Europe to court the Chinese economic giant and to equate European security with Mediterranean security?

In her Pax Britannica Trilogy, the great Welsh writer, Jan Morris, extensively reported, in her brilliant literary style, how a British governor had been driven to the point of exasperation by the “incredibly, politically alert Maltese”. Nothing, it seems, has changed since. Ask the Europeans.