I have news for Lawrence Gonzi and Joseph Muscat who, on Friday, said the country needs “a stable government”.

As things stand, the possibility is that we may well not get a stable government now or in the near future, regardless of who wins the next general election.

There are two specific reasons for this, explained to me by some old hands at politics.

First, the electoral districts, as they have been re-arranged (and they will be the same in the coming election) will more or less give us the same result, plus or minus a seat here or there.

The election can go either way, but the two parties will not be far apart.

Secondly, even if they end up far apart as far as the seats assigned can be, the recent constitutional amendments – beginning from 1987 onwards – give the minority party additional seats to respect the real proportion of votes obtained.

Twice since this amendment was introduced we have had a one-seat majority and twice that majority has proved to be fragile and fraught with uncertainty.

It is only a majority of more than one seat – for instance, a majority of three – that ensures a stable government. This is always a possibility in any election but it has become rather rare in our political context. The last time the government majority was more than one was the 2003 government, but that, it has to be remembered, came about after the EU referendum when Labour had campaigned for a No vote, declared the referendum had been won by the No side and allowed the canny Eddie Fenech Adami to go for an election within a month or so, thus retaining the big majority the Yes vote had enjoyed.

In addition, so my sources told me, there is reason to speculate that if Labour wins the coming election, and if it wins by a slender majority, a similar or perhaps greater instability may ensue “because while Lawrence Gonzi has one Franco Debono to contend with, Labour has quite a few Franco Debonos in their ranks”, ready to break those ranks if Dr Muscat does not give them what they, rightly or wrongly, believe is their due.

The government spin machine continues to demonise Franco Debono and he himself contributes mightily to his own bad press.

There he was, on a morning last week, in Queen’s Square, Valletta, sitting at the table nearest the road, wearing an anorak with ‘USA’ emblazoned on his back, arguing vehemently for all he was worth.

But he is not the only one on the government’s back bench to be sceptical or angry at the way the country is being governed. And this was the second discovery of the week. The difference between Dr Debono and the others is that the latter mutter behind closed doors and in private, while Dr Debono voices his feelings to all and sundry.

As I see it, Dr Gonzi musters real loyalty within his Cabinet – and in a very tight circle of hopefuls beyond that – but the loyalty does not extend much further.

I don’t know about the party, but then one has to ask what kind of party members are we talking about – is it the card-carrying delegates or those who voted PN last time around?

Come the election, whenever it is held, the chips will be down. As we have seen in the past 48 hours, many people rally to their party’s standards almost by instinct. But these are not the people who win the election: the election is won by the non-committed, the middle-of-the-roads, the undecideds, those whose instinct is to sit it out.

The party faithful are usually attracted to vote for the party heavyweights, but the undecideds tend to go for the new candidates, possibly because they can no longer stand the sight of the party’s old warhorses.

In the tight 2008 election, it proved impossible for the Nationalist Party to properly select and minutely examine its candidates. Some had even stood in the 2003 election, some even before that. The rot, in this case, dates back quite a number of years.

For all the comments that are being made now, it still does not seem possible for any real weeding out of candidates this side of the election.

Nor is this restricted to the PN side: Joseph Muscat leads a very broad church aiming to attract as many votes as possible. He has gathered around him a motley group, from old warhorses dating back to Dom Mintoff’s time to newer recruits with as yet untried loyalty.

That is why the instability is set to continue, whoever wins.

But it is also the reason to worry that, human nature being what it is, and the fact that not that many people enter politics with monkish ambitions to do good and nothing else, we will continue to have re-runs of the Dom Mintoff saga and now the Franco Debono saga.

On the other hand – and I am not referring to Dr Debono here but to those among his colleagues who are as sceptical and as outraged as he publicly is – all this and more should teach any future party leader, especially a future prime minister, to ensure that he and his colleagues tread more cautiously around people’s feelings instead of getting up their noses every so often.

This will not remove the possibility that a future government will be unstable, especially if it be based on a one-seat majority. On the contrary, I am saying this instability will persist. But along the way, just as we have found ways to get around what have seemed like unsurpassable difficulties, we should be able to find a way to ensure governance and democracy, even in an unstable and fragile political situation.

In the past, some of us yearned for the breakdown of the two-party system and perhaps for the emergence of a three-party system and coalition pattern. This, as we know, has not happened. But the political situation is evolving and maybe, just maybe, when government after government ends up facing instability and fragility, we will all learn the difficult art of negotiating rather than riding roughshod over people.

Maybe instability is not a degeneration of politics but the true way forward.

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