Houston, we have a problem.

Here we are, preparing ourselves for the election and they suddenly remove the carpet from under our feet. All our lives we have always lived through election with trepidation mixed with fear and now we find the two key figures – the deputy leaders no less – fighting each other with feathers, being nice to each other, not raising their voices, being moderate in whatever they said, mostly agreeing with each other. Incredible.

Where are the verbal dialectics of other times? The sonorous voice of Joe Debono Grech, for instance. Or the time when Tonio Fenech and his interlocutors used up all the time of a Bondiplus interview to barrack each other so loudly nobody could understand a word they were saying.

How can people be persuaded to do their duty, go to the polling stations and vote come 9 March when the main protagonists are pussyfooting it around each other? How can people already half-dead be persuaded it is their moral duty to risk everything and go and vote when it’s clear the two deputy leaders can work with each other, have indeed worked productively with each other already for many years in Brussels and Strasbourg, at the European Parliament?

We are exaggerating, no doubt. What we want to highlight is the seachange there has been in the language of politics. It is not a question, or rather not only, a question of the personal characters of the two persons recently appointed to such high positions, but something completely different. As long as politics in Malta remained a parochial affair, then the confrontational manner was the rule – eyeball to eyeball and who blinks first loses.

That’s not the way the European Parliament works. There it’s more a question of finding compromises, of forging alliances, of consultations and yet again more consultations, of involving civil society before any major decisions are taken. Votes are taken but it is rare when they become divisive – we saw this in the Tonio Borg decision.

That’s not the way national politics work in Malta. All past administrations, from whatever side, have been dirigiste. Even the outgoing administration still speaks in terms of ‘what we’ve done’ and ‘what we will do’, rarely in terms of policies. It’s as if there is no national administration at all and ministers have to do it all by themselves. That’s not how Brussels works. There they have a huge professional bureaucracy that works on its own steam. It is not overhauled with every change of government with half of it being condened to the sidelines and the other half promoted far above its level of competency.

All this may sound strange. All we usually get about the EP is verbal brickbats from UKIP types or allegations of fraud and sleaze. This is rather strange coming from the country with the smallest amount of MEPs (and even at six they are no cohesive whole).

Both Simon Busuttil and Louis Grech did not make it to Brussels from the House of Representatives in Valletta, so they avoided any professional deformation. There they learned there’s a different way of doing politics. Even though very thinly spread across the many committees they had to be present at, they had by necessity to be briefed by an extremely efficient Maltese Representation on issues coming up and the Maltese position, they had to consult and negotiate with their political groupings and at each juncture they learned to give ground and to make a stand. There was simply no time for grandstanding or for doing it all by themselves.

If now all this, or maybe significant parts of it, are transported on to the Maltese political stage, maybe that’s not a bad thing at all. We can all do without the normal Sturm und Drang that an election has come to mean.