Here we are, at the end of a year filled with anxiety and expectations, living a Christmas unlike any other, and expecting a further turmoil-filled two months until the election is over and done with, the victor acclaimed and the defeated hiding somewhere licking his wounds.

All the focus ultimately leads to one and only one issue: who gets the reins of power in his hands. Who gets to rule from Castille. Who gets to govern. Who gets to be invited to the European Council. Who gets this or that ministry. And even, although that is just inside the timeframe, who gets to run the country when Malta is President of the EU in 2017.

Ultimately, seeing the way things are here, it all amounts to one half of Malta getting all the power in its hands and shutting out the other half, which then tries its utmost to unseat the first half so as to get the power reins back in its hands.

This is how it has been, and how it looks like being in the near future. In the meantime we have had two administrations that had great problems with its one-seat majority. Our political system, both in principle and maybe too with the changes made to the Constitution and to boundary changes, seems to favour instability and one-seat majorities, and still we persist with this charade.

Come 9 March we will drag people from their sick beds and elderly people from their homes and drag them to vote. We will get people on the electoral register to come from abroad, with ridiculously cheap tickets, hoping they will remember to vote when they come (it has happened that people who came here with the cheap tickets did not get to vote).

We will wait with bated breath for that moment, usually around midday, when the victor is announced after which everything, but everything changes.

Time and again, we have voted potential third parties out of existence (and our main parties have carefully set up a very high benchmark to stop any possibility of a third party making it to Parliament). The reason, or excuse, that keeps getting relayed is that third parties encourage instability.

But time and again, in 1998 and in 2012, we have had that dreaded instability, which in 1998 brought the government down after less than two years and in 2012 has left us without an approved budget.

What we have seen so far, in this election campaign even before the House was dissolved, was nothing compared to what we may still see: the polemics, the name-calling, the spin, the hatred one side will feel against the other, the split in our national fabric.

We have seen, or sensed, that some of our political animals would have wanted the instability issue faced months ago, that for them even Christmas came as a distraction, as no doubt Carnival will be. Come 7 January, the wraps will be taken off the big political guns and there will be ‘just’ two months and two days of mayhem until the Day comes.

Many people simply have no idea of what Alfred Sant called the ‘power of incumbency’. It got him down in 2008, and its machine has been honed to an art after that experience. People just will not admit to it, but people have had jobs handed to them (even when they were unqualified and/or untrained), houses and apartments have been assigned, or promised. Collective agreements have been signed by the dozen.

How all this impacts on the national accounts will be left for the coming months. Usually, the national accounts for the year are published around March, so you may be sure they will not be published before 9 March. And in any case, there will always be time for adjustments and corrections to be made.

The coming battle or debate, call it what you will, will see the personalisation of political debate brought down to the lowest range, where anybody can understand. We have already seen this in the personalization of the billboards before Christmas. This is not a presidential election, as we usually see. This is politics brought down to the lowest possible level. It is not just the leaders leading the debate but also the leaders hogging all debate, excluding all others.

Or rather, this is how it looked like until the John Dalli resignation inspired Lawrence Gonzi to choose Tonio Borg, which created a vacancy, which created a mini election, and which propelled Simon Busuttil to the fore. It’s now become Simon with everything. The party media have attributed him with all kinds of miracles, even to the point of ascribing Joe Muscat’s decision to jettison Anglu Farrugia just on the strength of a mishandled debate.

From GonziPN we now have SimonPN, which suits Lawrence Gonzi down to the ground considering the negative image he now has.

On the other side, whatever may have been the reason behind Dr Muscat’s decision as regards Dr Farrugia, the choice of Louis Grech, who did not even have a mini-election campaign to make, Mr Grech is, one might say, a mirror image of Simon Busuttil. It’s not just that both are MEPs, but also that Mr Grech is deemed acceptable to those who may have been put off by Dr Farrugia’s links with the Labour government of the 1980s.

It all adds up to this: there is no ideological divide between the two parties. No issue sees them split on either side of the fence. Once the electoral manifestos are out one can compare them and hold them up to the light: there will not be any space between them, so identical they will be.

I repeat: the one and only issue will be who gets his hands on the steering wheel. Who makes it to Castille. Who gets to parcel out the ministries, who gets which ministry.

What a pity. What a tremendous pity.

We get to have this regular, five-yearly, bloodbath (hopefully figuratively) when there is so much more to do.

First of all, given Malta’s place and role in the world today, no one half of the island can adequately cope with the responsibilities Malta will have to shoulder. Consider, just consider this only: the 2017 presidency. We may think that is still far away (and concentration on V18 may have made us overlook there is something called Malta17 before it) but rest assured it is not that far away. Countries that will have the presidency one or two terms ahead of us already have plans, budgets and training people.

Just one half of us does not have what it takes to do well in Europe and even this half, which got us into Europe and into the euro, did quite well at an intermediate level but boobed at the top levels. With this one half getting everything policy we restrict our choices and our potential.

Then again, this conflict between the two halves makes us forget we have other, unfinished, and impossible to delay further, business.

Ever since 1979 we have had accession to the EU as our lodestar. With a wrong turning or two (1995 when Kohl kept us out and 1996 when Alfred Sant froze the application) and with a searing campaign in 2003, we finally made it. We then made it, not without further controversy, to the euro in 2008.

Now that we are in, and in the innermost circle, we have no idea what comes next. Our battles are territorial and terrestrial, our mindsets still in the times we were a colony or in the first years of independence. We have not realised how much we have grown, that we are now living in a changed dimension. We still think, Labour more than PN if truth be told, that we are back in the old manufacturing era with big factories and cheap labour, when in fact our workforce is now attuned to financial services, ICT and medical equipment.

That’s one part of us, the one that’s going places. The other part is still focused on construction and building more and more apartments, and so on.

We lack, in other words, a real appreciation of our new potential and this one half grabs all may mean, in the worst hypothesis, that as a nation we stay put for a legislature or two while the other half, which has been carefully kept out of everything, gets its hands on the levers of power and learns from its mistakes, which will all cost us dearly.

This is not to say, as the spinners would have it, that this means only one party gets to govern, that only one party is capable of governing. If anything, we’ve come to this precisely because the chaps at Castille at no point tried to get other people involved but rather kept everything close to their chest.

So that in the end, not just the Opposition rose up in anger but also those who, like Franco Debono or JPO, would have liked to try their hand and were shut out of the action. Until they blew up.

We are still without a solution to that. The two leaders aim for the ultimate prize and are trying to boost their defences where they’re weak or camouflage their weaknesses but have yet to come to their senses and propose a system where power is shared more equably and fairly and where as many as can be are engaged in decision-making.

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