The Prime Minister has become practically invisible, while the country has been in an election mode for weeks. He carries on with his prime ministerial duties as if there’s nothing more important and in so doing seems to be denying the prevalent public perception that he and his party are down in the polls and so must work harder to change public perceptions.

The only change I can see is a more pro-active administration on the various pop-issues (like ACTA, gay rights etc) that crop up.

Maybe Dr Gonzi will say he is waiting for the leadership vote of yesterday fortnight, though I am sure he will announce the election soon after that vote. Maybe he will not get so far for the real kingmaker in these turmoil-filled days is Franco Debono, not Dr Gonzi.

Anyway, the campaign is well under way but the PN is still absent. Absent from the billboards and absent from the running. Nevertheless, PN candidates, like PL ones, are busy making house visits.

But where PN is completely absent is in delineating the contours of the coming platform.

Sometimes I get the impression this administration wants to be re-elected on the strength of its achievements (which are many) and of having delivered what it said it would (that is until Dr Debono started to rock the boat). I am sure anyone in the government’s shoes would feel that is the best way to go to the country.

But elections are never won on the strength of what was done. On the contrary, voters are more interested in what is coming, what the parties promise for the future and whether what they say is credible or not.

Besides, people may have a different idea about what was done, about this government’s achievements. Take Arriva, for example: despite the improvements you still find people who are heavily critical. Take the dockyard issue, or the Air Malta issue, and ditto!

As for the government’s repeated boasts that it has kept the Maltese economy safe from the turmoil in Europe, that needs heavy qualification. Maybe the deficit has been brought down, but the public debt figures continue to mount. Maybe we do have one of the lowest unemployment figures in Europe but then wages and salaries have been kept on the lower side. And we still get calls to uncouple wage increases from COLA.

Many would mention the fact that the people who believe they are at risk of poverty has risen over the past months while it is also a fact that many people, even from what we would consider to be the middle class, find the going hard today, especially because of the water and electricity as well as gas charges. (Is it only my impression, or have the electricity bills somehow stopped coming? Or will they all come with a bang the day after the election?)

So an election platform based on this administration’s achievements, much though that would gratify those in power, could be easily undermined and turned into a negative outlook by a careful campaign from the electoral alternative.

It will be more important to propose the way for the future.

Here again, the government may find itself drawn into a head-to-head battle with the Opposition as to who may propose the better offers to the country. This government has already bound itself with various red lines – no charges for healthcare (despite economic logic), no removal of stipends (maybe with more reason), and the understated one that says no one will be sacked from wider government employment (including Air Malta).

What I believe is required by this administration and this governing party is the courage to come clean. Even now, with this administration in power, there are still widespread areas where Malta, though struggling, has yet to climb up to more acceptable EU levels.

An exercise by a person, with the pen name Platernian, on Friday’s l-orizzont quoted for instance former minister and now Governor of the Central Bank Josef Bonnici who, in 2003, argued that unless Malta entered the EU, it would take Malta 25 years to reach EU levels. From 2005 to 2011, the article added, Malta’s GDP per capita measured by PPS, rose from 78 per cent of the EU average to 83 per cent, so it will still take us 25 years to reach EU levels.

One would like to question this assumption: one has to clarify, for instance, what counted as the EU average pre-accession, also factoring in that since then the EU has also taken in Bulgaria and Romania, which pull the EU average downwards. So our average should have been much better.

That is only one benchmark: there are many others because today our economy is continually scrutinized and measured so we know in a far better way exactly where we stand.

Yet efforts are still made to cloud crystal-clear figures. Last Wednesday, for example, the EU Council and the Commission issued a joint report, which clearly stated that Malta had the worst figure for early school-leavers in the entire EU at 36.9 per cent. This was however reported as “Malta moving slowly” and the next day the heading was “Malta is not doing so bad with regard to education, after all”. Now that is worse than coating the pill – that, in my book, is pulling wool over people’s eyes so that they do not see how bad the situation is.

There are other figures worthy of full consideration that came up over the past days and which have not been given their due in the current PN-PL eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation of the internal one in the PN between Lawrence Gonzi and Franco Debono.

NSO, for instance, reported that industrial production in Malta decreased at a faster rate in December (9.7 per cent) than it did in November (4 per cent).

Eurostat reported that Malta had the largest reduction in total retail trade in December of the entire eurozone (along with Slovenia).

It is equally true that according to another Eurostat statistic, Malta, along with Italy, had the greatest decrease in government debt at the end of the third quarter.

And a competitiveness scoreboard prepared by the Maastricht Economic and Social Research and Training Centre on Innovation and Technology, in collaboration with the European Commission’s in-house science service, the Joint Research Centre, some days ago, and which was unreported in the Maltese media, said that “Malta is one of the moderate innovators with a below average performance. Relative strengths are in Intellectual assets and economic effects. Relative weaknesses are in human resources, open, excellent and attractive research systems, finance and support, linkages & entrepreneurship and Innovators. High growth is observed for new doctorate graduates, International scientific co-publications, community trademarks and knowledge-intensive services exports. A strong decline is observed for public-private co-publications and licence and patent revenues from abroad. Growth performance in human resources, open, excellent and attractive research systems, Intellectual assets and Innovators is well above average.”

Then, of course, there are the very recent downgrades by credit rating agencies that the government blamed on the outside economic situation in the eurozone but which contributes to Malta slipping from an A-grade country to an under-achiever.

To which one must add, in my personal opinion, the more recent downgrade of Malta when it was not even invited to take part in the unilateral move by nine eurozone states to trigger a Financial Transactions Pact given its often-expressed objection to this French proposal. This is a matter, Maltastar helpfully informed us, on which there is agreement between the government and the Opposition. It is true that Malta’s financial services sector is vulnerable and strategic, but are we all that sure that staying out of FTT is in our country’s long-term interest? We are not the UK, and unlike the UK, we are in the eurozone.

So this is where the proposals to be made by the parties must be evaluated. The electorate must decide which of the two parties ensures the better future. This administration has sloughed off the burden of the dockyards, that of the public transport, and is in the process of slimming down the burden posed by Air Malta. However, it has burdened itself and the public purse by so many quangos, authorities and the like, all staffed by partisans. And it has not reformed all that needed to be reformed.

Even so, with such a hand on the tiller and a focus on reducing the deficit, our growth has been sluggish at best.

On the other hand, as I wrote some days ago, the Opposition still makes expansionary noises and the commitment to cut the water and electricity rates may weaken further the country’s finances, kick-start a consumer rush which will eventually entail importing more goods and pushing more money outside the country. An election fought over give-aways will inevitably impact our economy negatively, as happened in the not-so-distant future.

The challenge at this point is quite stark: who will dare speak the truth to the public and who will propose the harder and more sustainable (in the longer term) route to a better economic future?

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