Finally, it is crunch time. After eight very long weeks of campaigning, and an unofficial election campaign that has dragged on for over a year, the electorate at long last goes to the polls on Saturday burdened with some heavy choices, as well as a maze of issues and scandals to navigate on the way to the polling station.

In a pair of interviews in today’s issue, both the Nationalist and Labour party leaders make strong arguments as to why their respective parties should be entrusted to guide Malta through the coming five years and whatever those years may hold in store. 

After all, the last five years have seen a global economic meltdown and ensuing recession that have wrought havoc on several European economies to our north and an Arab Spring that unseated three long-ruling dictators to our south.

On the one hand, we have an incumbent party that argues that only it can guarantee the kind of job creation the country needs and that its economic track record in the tough times the world has witnessed since 2009 speaks for itself.

On the other we have a challenging Opposition party that pledges a new way of doing politics, a clean break from what it describes as the politics of the past and a new governmental order that will see the populace being included more in the government’s decision-making processes.

Now, just five days before the pre-electoral period of silence begins on Friday, the country’s political leaders are to make their last stand, their last appeal to the electorate to stay the course, to not change horse in midstream, or to go for what is being pledged as a completely different style of doing politics.

But the general feeling among the electorate is one of weariness. They have grown tired hearing the same debates and accusations for eight weeks, not to mention a whole year of unofficial campaigning.

This period will be the last ditch effort to sway those floating voters who have not yet made up their minds, at least according to the surveys, and it is these people that hold the power to turn the tide one way or another.

And it is in this final home stretch that the parties need to drive home their core messages – to return to the basic brass tacks of their electoral programmes. The campaign had started out promisingly as a battle of the proposals, first on energy and then onto other worthy matters but the turn the overall debate took in the second half of the campaign has been a degenerative one indeed.

Now the Nationalist Party may have a point when it lambasts the Opposition leader for not having reported what he came to know about a drug case at one of the party’s clubs, and it is their prerogative to argue that Labour is not fit to govern the country. But then again, the Opposition leader has also taken a bold, somewhat politically risky but correct decision to own up and apologise for that – it takes a real politician to stand up and be counted in such a way, especially at a time when so much is at stake.

Both the main parties have engaged in mudslinging, perhaps to differing extents, but at the end of the day they have done themselves and the electorate no favours by appealing to this lowest common denominator, corruption allegations, with ‘allegations’ being the operative word here.

A party with a real vision for the country does not 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 should be played.

As a result, those members of the of the electorate who have not become totally engrossed with the 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 what has become on many levels an ugly campaign. 

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 has been submerged in.

In these final days of the campaign the electorate must re-focus itself and return to the question of the national interest and seeking the best government and course for the country. What we need to be discussing is who is best equipped to guide the country through whatever unknown challenges lie in store over the next half decade, that and nothing else.