With ten days left to this exhaustive, protracted election campaign, it is now high time that both the main political parties returned to the basics, the brass tacks of the campaign. And by that we mean a return to the debate over the parties’ vision for the country as embodied in their policy proposals.

The turn the overall debate has taken is a sorry one indeed.  The electorate is being fed what some believe it wants to hear about and in the process it is instead being starved of what it needs to know about.  And by appealing to this lowest common denominator, the corruption factor, neither party is doing itself, or the electorate, much justice.

A party with a real vision for the country does not seek to present the electorate with a choice of which party is simply the least corrupt by slinging a lot of mud that is not sticking.  A party with a real vision for the country will not trade off that vision in favour of belittling their competition.  But instead the parties seem to subscribe to the adage that ‘if you throw enough mud at the wall, some of it will stick’.

This is simply not the way responsible politics is played.

As a result, those members of the of the electorate who have not become totally engrossed with the Nationalist and Labour cross-party allegations of rampant corruption, illicit wall clocks and blocks of ice, or drugs depending on which version of the facts one subscribes to, have become increasingly disinterested in this increasingly ugly campaign. 

For what had started out quite promisingly as a real battle of the policies has, as perhaps could have been expected, degenerated into an all-out battle for votes that has placed the electorate in the unenviable position of feeling it has to choose from the lesser of two evils. 

The sad fact of the matter is that much of the mudslinging appears to have been premeditated, given the fact that it would appear both parties have held on to certain information as stockpiled ammunition for use over these nine weeks.  They may dispute that but it is simply not possible that all these scandals have come together to unravel themselves during these particular nine weeks.

This does not mean that the issues being raised are not serious, they are very serious indeed - so serious in fact that something should have been done about the scandals that have come out when information related to the alleged misdeeds first came out, instead of being held on to for an opportune time.

But the fact of the matter is that this has become a campaign of innuendos, without enough tangible proof against the comportment of one party and/or its affiliates to sway the coveted floating voter one way or another.

In this final home stretch of the election campaign, the electorate deserves a lot better than what it is getting. And the more we learn that much of the information being bandied about by the parties with the aim of discrediting certain individuals has been held onto for so long, years in some cases, the less interested people are in this very long endurance test of an election campaign that the country is submerged in.

Labour leader Joseph Muscat has called for a return to the debate over policies. He is, of course, absolutely right but the timing of the call is perhaps somewhat more questionable, with the Nationalist Party now having fired back a number of salvos in the direction of the Labour Party over the oil procurement commissions’ scandal.

In this campaign, what has happened to the national interest, and seeking the best government and course for the country? This all appears to have been thrown out the window in favour of what the spin doctors feel will win their team the honour and privilege, for that is exactly what it is, of administering the country for the next five years.

But the problem is that all this mudslinging, and both parties are pretty much equal in the guilt stakes here, will at the end of the day erode the public’s confidence in its politicians. That is the last thing the country needs after the last year of this legislature, when Parliament was on so many occasions reduced to a mockery of democracy.

What we need to be discussing is who is best equipped to guide the country through the challenges ahead, and not who was able to build up the best war chest of scandals for use at some point down the road, at election time.

This state of affairs certainly does not bode well for the public’s trust in those it elects to run the country, and it will perhaps be the party that returns to this central issue with some modicum of sanity that will emerge victorious on polling day.

At this rate many, and especially the coveted floating voter who see a lack of thrust in the parties’ policies, will prefer not being tasked with having to choose from the lesser of two evils, and will simply choose to stay away from the polling booths altogether on Election Day.