Now that Christmas and NYE are over, and the lights will soon be switched off and decorations taken down, life in Malta will revert to the usual. That, in the Maltese context, means reverts back to the political.

Soon, soon enough, we will have the fun and games that we have ‘missed’ for the past three years. In March, half of this country’s voters will have the opportunity to vote in the local council elections.

That is fun and games for most of us. It is true that for some, maybe, an election (more a general election than a local council election) can be quite stressful, as recent studies have shown. But for most of us Maltese, for whom politics is a daily battle, an election is fun.

Soon, quite soon, the parties will begin mobilising for the election. Soon the candidates will be making themselves known. Soon they will begin to go round door to door. In many cases, they have already begun doing so.

Local council politics, as we all know, is a relatively new entrant in the local context, but over the past years it has become part of the local panorama. We may even say it has brought national politics down to the local pump level, to real grassroots level. At the same time, however, it has raised a multitude of people to a high social standing since they began dabbling in local council politics, sat on the various committees, took to wearing the badges of honour, were given pride of place at civic ceremonies, etc. A new level of politicians was born.

Some could be pensioners dedicating their free time to civic concerns but others learn what politics is about from such a grassroots level and in fact go on to the national level.

With more and more devolution of powers to the local level, local councils have indeed become a very important level of government where the rules of contract assignment and the need to be seen to deliver become as important as those on the national level.

The March local council elections may be seen as a sort of test-tube assessment of the national mood, given that within a year we will have our national election. But they may also be seen as an assessment of what the voters think about the direction taken by the particular local council over the past term.

Every council has its own story, or skein of stories and every council has its own success stories as well as its failure stories.

In the coming March elections attention will be on each and every locality, obviously, but it will be specially focused on those councils where the majority may shift to the other side. For while the law of averages works in great numbers, there is inside each locality, a majority and a minority and with (a few) abstentions (since in Malta people rarely switch from one side to the other). The majority may quickly become the minority and vice-versa.

In the coming local council elections, for instance, there are two specific localities which will be specially watched and about which the electoral battle will be the keenest. This is due to both the possibility of the locality switching political allegiance and also some rather widespread discontent at the way the locality was managed over the past term.

One such case is Mosta, one of the largest localities in Malta, and also one of the localities with most problems. Mosta lies in the PN-area of Malta but at the last election it switched from its normal PN majority to a PL one thanks to a sustained campaign based on a hard-working handyman who accumulated quite a good revenue between his salary and his hefty overtime.

The years under PL rule have not seen any improvement in Mosta’s fortunes, also because the mayor soon became a quite controversial figure not just with the PN minority but also with his own majority itself.

Another case is Ħamrun which switched from a PN majority some two or three terms ago. The locality is in a district with a Labour majority but its present majority team is not felt to have been adequate to the town’s pressing needs. However, it may equally be the case that this is a locality which is getting progressively more elderly and more poor, with young couples finding residence away and the number of empty houses on the increase.

Whatever the case in these, the coming weeks should see the focus shift from the national scene to the local one and people will be asked to judge whether the majority in ‘power’ has used its power for the benefit of the community or otherwise.

Let the fun begin.