Sluggishly, like when one awakes from a long slumber, the House of Representatives is due to meet again tomorrow after this extra long four-week Easter break.

No meeting of the House Business Committee is scheduled, which is indicative of the chasm between the government and the Opposition especially since Carm Mifsud Bonnici took over from the more suave Tonio Borg as Leader of the House.

The agenda is as long as your arm, with two motions (MCESD and Code of Organisation and Civil Procedure amendment) and no less than 14 bills all waiting to continue being discussed.

Apart from there being no meeting set for the House Business Committee, there is no meeting set for the Public Accounts Committee either, and other committees.

Nevertheless, the committee headed by Franco Debono for the re-codification of laws meets at 1.15pm tomorrow and the Family Affairs Committee headed by Jean Pierre Farrugia meets at 7pm, also tomorrow, to discuss the challenges of a typical Maltese family.

Other committees are due to meet later on in the week, including Thursday afternoon.

Life goes on regardless. Questions are asked and perhaps answered. Debates follow one another. But no vote is announced because the announcement of a vote will snap us back to pre-electoral tension as happened in the past months.

We have never experienced this surreal atmosphere of outward calm and inner turmoil. We have gone from expecting the government to fall at any moment to wondering if the government will fall at all.

People say wait for the next vote as surely there must be a vote on the Bill implementing the Budget by the middle of May so then we will know whether Franco Debono will vote against the government and bring it down, abstain or even vote in favour.

The government itself, while trying to stretch out its time by every means, knows that in the end its future is not exactly in its hands.

So it’s all left hanging in the air with no one really knowing what’s going on and what will happen.

In a way, I feel, however, that this long wait is taking its toll on the Opposition, rather than on the government. MPs are running here and there and going on house visits like there’s no tomorrow. The government is very busy announcing this or that policy. Simon Busuttil is hard at work trying to mend fences with sectors that had become dissatisfied with the government – the latest move on MCESD membership left the established members spluttering with rage but there was nothing one could do about it.

Yet the numbers in the latest opinion poll show, as I had written some weeks ago, that it is far too gone to turn around. Not even Sarkozy in France has that kind of gap, and he is said to be doomed.

Yet, from people more savvy than me on the electoral process, and from either side of the political divide, I was told last week that Lawrence Gonzi might still claw his way back. I admit that I still cannot see this happening.

Giulio Andreotti, that old fox of a thousand lives, once said “Il potere logora chi non c’e l’ha” – power drains those who do not have it. This may be very true, just look at Prince Charles.

For if you’re in Opposition you live in expectation of that blessed day when the people cast their vote and you hope the next day’s sun will rise to see you triumphant. You promise and promise and promise again, maybe not realising people are measuring you up and seeing how far they can get you to go.

This happens every time an election comes round, but in today’s case we are speaking of a party that has been in power for 25 years, bar two. A party that has grown tired in power, and that spent its political mileage in bringing an end to the Dom Mintoff era in 1987, in getting Malta to join the EU and the euro and now is left high and dry without a clear objective to offer people except maybe more of the same.

That explains the nasty and scurrilous nature of the attacks on Labour, not that Labour itself does not contribute to its faux pas.

There is then the particular nature of the Gonzi years – its concentration on a small network of loyal ministers without the broad reach of the Fenech Adami years, without proper checks and balances in a Cabinet where each minister is left to do his/her own thing. There is pretty little oversight and each ministry is a world on its own.

Talking about Sarkozy – there is in Malta an analogical deep-seated aversion to the man at the top, obviously for very different reasons. Maybe Lawrence Gonzi does not have a good press; maybe it was his stance on the divorce issue, maybe he has been tagged by the failings of his ministers. Just as in France, it is more a vote against Sarkozy than for Hollande, so too in Malta the presence of the Prime Minister is a dampener and brings with it a concoction of negative feelings.

This could explain the anger that one senses in PN candidates. There are those who have openly rebelled and who face execution at the polls. But there are those who honestly feel they tried their best but were never seriously considered and appreciated at Castille. Many of them feel that with Lawrence Gonzi they are heading for defeat but there is now no way, of course, to change that.

This government is paying for the mistakes of the past and it is only fair to blame its predecessor for at least some of the faults that afflict the present.

Over the past legislatures, this government duplicated the people in government employment by creating authorities, agencies, corporations – the lot. The people in this second level of government generally have better packages than those slaving away in the departments and the ministries. The people manning them generally come from the PN gene pool yet this development has not brought about any welcome change for better efficiency or streamlining. Otherwise we would not get, this late, promises that the government will streamline its action and that a one-stop shop is the solution that will change matters.

These agencies, authorities and so on, are nothing more than the government’s lunga manus, held tightly by ministers and kept under close control. End of the dream of civil service autonomy and responsibility.

At the same time, the government has also failed at the other end of its operation – at the high end. Years ago, it had promised civil service reform through the introduction of permanent secretaries who would be accountable and motivated by a productivity bonus. It all ended up with the top level of civil servants echelons in a bizarre musical chairs exercise. They have, I know I am generalizing, simply transposed their inefficiency and mediocrity a notch higher. The few who came from the private sector were quickly, and relatively easily, squeezed out.

In typical Maltese tradition, all this means that it is only an electoral defeat (or victory for the other side) that shakes things up. People are seriously afraid of this, and I admit too of having serious fears the change will be too much for our country, but at this point change is inevitable. This government has run into the shallows and has become stuck, operating according to formulas that have been tried and tested and have been found wanting. Given that the Maltese tradition is so schizophrenic – black or white, blue or red – the most probable outcome will be to exchange today’s incompetents with tomorrow’s.

Meanwhile, as politicians of all hues continue to render the air blue with vituperation and, as the country again feels election tempers rising (which given the uncertainty can be held at a moment’s notice or as late as Dr Gonzi can stretch it), one gets the impression that this four-week interlude has come as a blessing to a people fed up of this partisan conflict.

I cannot help thinking that the funny thing is that in past elections much effort was expended to eliminate all third parties claiming that a third party means instability whereas here we have lived the past year in perpetual instability, with a Parliament of only two parties that has just a one-seat difference between them.

Perhaps the antidote to the stress that will come with an election is to remember that the once almighty parties have become as fragile as their slender majority is and that this Punch & Judy show is nothing more than a tussle to get their hands on the levers of power, following which they will then reveal to be as incompetent as their hated predecessors were or are.

The tragedy, for tragedy it is, is that Malta could be much better than it has been allowed to be by its politicians.

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