The time is fast approaching for the most important moment in a democracy. Soon you and the whole nation will decide your future for the next five years. Your vote counts and is sacrosanct: make sure you use it and make sure you use it intelligently.

In this mad campaign we have heard it all. The Labour Party has changed its face but not its soul. It has tried hard to become electable and has done what no party has ever done in Malta – it has blitzed itself into our homes, on to our roads and lately even on all the international websites popular with Maltese people. Today PL spokesmen keep claiming that we are verging on economic collapse and nearly all of us are on the poverty line. So it is highly ironic and amusing – if not downright tragic – that the party is spending so much money on advertising campaigns, billboards and lavish outside facilities to get its message across.

The amounts that Labour is spending are astounding. If it is true that all this money is coming straight from big business, my heart misses more than a thousand beats. How is Labour going to control these businessmen who are bankrolling its campaign if it gets into power? But I go beyond this point: if Alfred Sant used to worry so much about the “hbiebtal-hbieb” (“friends of friends”) and cast innuendo after innuendo about the PN, what does he think now? Where is he now? Can he move out of his new-found shell of silence and speak his mind? Does he, like Anglu Farrugia, think that Labour has sold its soul to the big contractors?

As he did with everyone who stood in his way, Joseph Muscat has got rid of Anglu Farrugia – even if his words and accusations are still valid and unbelievable condemnation of the man who keeps telling us he wants to launch new-style politics. Anglu said that Joseph Muscat has committed political murder. He actually said that Joseph Muscat has shot him dead – figuratively but most efficiently. He then silenced him by sending him on a conference holiday, ironically to The Falklands, as far away as possible and a place that has been the scene of a very important war.

Even Alfred Sant was silenced – he was conveniently given the chance to become an MEP candidate. Again, the irony is unbelievable but what is surely obvious is that Sant’s mouth was sealed. A former leader of the party who obviously is at loggerheads with the way the party has been torn and transformed is not good for morale so promise him a ticket to Brussels.

Let Alfred Sant speak up now about Muscat and his friends of friends and his ways. This is not about choice but about what our country is going to have to suffer if Joseph Muscat is chosen as Malta’s next prime minister for the coming five years.

The worrying thing about Labour has always been that it cannot be trusted – and you hear some people say that yes, it is true that we are taking a risk, but it’s worth going for the change. Democracy gives you, the voter, this choice – so if you want to waste your vote by going for change just on a whim, go ahead and do so. But remember, democracy does not offer you a safety valve that springs back if the change you desire turns sour. If you make a choice based on a whim and that choice is wrong, then it is too late. Once we have problems and your job and way of life is threatened, then it will be too late to cry and to try to turn the clock back.

With the PN you know where you stand – on solid ground, on tested ground, on ground that can only give you and your children a better future. With Labour you might lose it all. Can you risk it?