The many opinion polls being conducted at this time invariably show a huge section of ‘Don’t Knows, Don’t Tells.’

In any election as closely fought as ours are, this is the most crucial segment of voters.

Studying the composition and the motivations of this segment of the electorate is thus the most crucial and urgent task for any party that would want to muster a majority of votes. But this is the most obdurate, the most intractable, and the most shifting segment of the electorate.

So far, the two parties are sounding their battle bugles and the core supporters are heeding the call. This was clear from the Independence Day mass meeting for the PN and the one held a day or two later by the PL.

The way the various opinion polls are treated on the papers by psephologists and opinion writers seems to imply a belief that ultimately, the ‘Don’t Knows’ will support each side proportionally.

That may well be true, but there is a hidden threat, a hidden message in the blank refusal by such people to reveal their voting preferences to the pollsters. These are the people in whose hands the fate of the election lies. They are the king-makers, and they know it. These are the people with the real power in their hands. They can make or unmake any party.

Studying the motivation of this huge segment is thus the urgent and priority duty of any party that wants to win the election. The problem is that no one seems to really understand what this segment wants, or of whom it consists. You look at people in the streets – some are clearly committed to either side, but others are indefinable. You mentally list the people in your extended family and realise that there are several members that cannot easily be placed on either side of the partisan scale.

This segment is made up of hundreds of different strands and lumping them together as the ‘Don’t Knows,’ does not help at all.

There are the usual people who hold out till the very end and who play either side against the other. They might know which party they will be voting for in the end, but they play hard to get.

This segment is the most fickle. When the opinion polls ask which party you supported in 2008 and try to get points of significance for the coming election, they may be misunderstanding the whole mental process. For to ask, “who did you vote for in 2008” as if that is a sure sign of political appurtenance, misunderstands the frame of mind of this segment in which party tradition, let alone family tradition, pays a very small part. It may be that they voted the way they voted in 2008, because in the end, one party appealed to them more than the other. Or rather, to put it in different words, because one party was more non-appealing to them than the other.

There was in 2008, for instance, the JPO saga. Ever since that day, one issue that has never been properly settled (in the absence of real data) has always been whether JPO’s tears, his running after Alfred Sant and his confrontation with the Labour leader, served to garner more votes for him and the PN than it had lost them. An alternative version is that the whole saga almost cost the PN the election, were it not for the very late revelation of documentation that nailed JPO. Which version is right?

By that time, Alfred Sant was high on the negativity stakes for many reasons, including his being the target of PN activists everywhere, from the media to university and back again.

This time, it is Lawrence Gonzi who heads the negativity stakes, again, maybe due to the spin against him by his rebel backbenchers, by sections of the media, and by the PL.

Mainly, I feel that people vote according to spin, not against it.

Then there are also the various minorities. One hesitates to list them, for they range the whole gamut; from foreigners, to people married to former asylum seekers; from people living a life of misery and poverty, where politics is rarely relevant, to people in the new minorities, such as divorced couples and gays.

The parties are doing their utmost to suss out these minorities and get them to see things from their points of view, but I guess it is hard going.

Such people face problems and difficulties that the rest of the population knows nothing about. I know I am lumping together people who resent being lumped together – that itself is a sign of how intractable this varied segment is.

Let me speak, therefore, generally. There are many people for whom life is very, very difficult, people for whom it is a question of holding on, of seeing where the next sum of money will come from. Even in this supposedly non-judgemental society, many feel judged, cornered, weighed and are found wanting. A small society such as ours, and a traditional one to boot, can be vicious in the way it treats minorities.

In the past years, our society has taken significant steps to come to terms with some of these minorities. Against the advice of the Prime Minister and his party, the country has chosen to enact laws allowing divorce. As for gays, today’s society is more gay-sensitive and accepting than those that preceded it. But still, there are huge swaths of the population in silent revolt, which have not really accepted and digested the changes.

The issue is how the persons in these minorities will see things and vote. A quite large segment of the ‘Don’t Knows’ are foreigners, asylum seekers with a vote, and generally, people with a very precarious job or people out of a job. There is a last-minute flurry of people seeking jobs, or seeking better or more stable jobs.

Then there is a huge area, whatever the politicians might say, of people who are completely browned off with our political hot-house atmosphere, young people who aim to enjoy themselves and who just do not really dig this ratcheting up of hatred, the spewing out of everything from billboards to blogs. These are people who are out to enjoy life, or who have found that their only interest is in advancing through their studies, not through any political patronage.

That is precisely because of one real change that Malta has made, the new approach to studying that has come as a result of the opening up of the university with the removal of the points system post-1987, the expansion of courses, not just at university, but, even more importantly, at MCAST, the increased possibility of furthering one’s studies abroad, etc.

Among the students that have entered university and MCAST these past weeks, many come from families who have never had a student at the university. The class barriers have fallen. And even if both parties make huge efforts to name and tag the students, once again, a huge proportion refuse to be tagged, refuse to say what their opinions are and refuse to reveal on which side they will land in the end. That is why the inner core of the ‘Don’t Knows’ reflects the agnosticism of many students who are non-political and non-partisan by nature and by deliberate choice.

There is now the opportunity for a real writer, or alternatively, a television series writer, to come up with a classic novel, or an all-time soap winner. Ideally, the format would be to take a mixture of people living in Malta in 2012, both Maltese and foreigners, from a variety of families, of different sexual orientations, coming, if possible, from different milieux, different areas and different traditions - mix, stir well and watch what emerges.

They had tried to do it, if I remember correctly, in the weeks before the EU referendum, when they had a sort of Grande Fratello with people from disparate backgrounds discussing the EU issue. Maybe with hindsight, that was rather piloted; the spin was always there.

But if this time round, someone can be found to write such a series, there, in a completely natural and unconscious way, you would have your answer to the question: What does Malta want?

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