The die has been cast with the casting of the final votes of Election 2013 last night. For better or for worse only time will tell, but the electorate has made its choice and sometime this afternoon the results of the general election will be out.

Roughly half the country will be elated and the other half will see their high hopes plummet into the doldrums. But what will be important in the days following this election is that these two halves of the country become one once again. And there is no doubt that they will, just as they did in the wake of the bitter divorce referendum.

Despite all the political propaganda foisted upon voters over the last, excruciatingly long, nine weeks, and despite one’s personal political inclinations, anyone with a modicum of common sense surely knows that none of the parties contesting this hard-fought election will ruin the country over the next five years.

The Labour Party may have been advocating the necessity of a change in the country’s direction and the Nationalist Party may have argued that the direction that the country is headed is the right one, but certainly neither party will send the country down the road to ruin.

It is now high time to do away with the divisions that have split the country, not only over these last nine weeks of official campaigning but in actual fact also over the last 15-odd months of unofficial campaigning in which practically every trick in the book was used by one party to remain in power and the other to claim power. But enough of that sorry situation, the country now needs to look forward, forward to the next five years.

We wish the winner of this election, whoever that may be, every success in administering the country over the next legislature, as should any Maltese. After all, this is about the national interest and not one’s political tribe. This, we hope, was the thought that coursed through the minds of the electorate on their way to the polling booth.

To the victor go the spoils, but certainly not the spoiling of the country.

Freedom of speech

The sorry episode that panned out over the last 36-odd hours, if nothing else, shows that it is also high time to obliterate the ridiculous law on the so-called day of silence. In this day and age, this law is about as useful as a chocolate teapot. 

There may be a valid argument for political parties to cease and desist at least on Election Day but this should no longer be applicable to the traditional and new media – it is an insult to the electorate’s intelligence.

More than that, the archaic regulation is counterproductive to both the tenets of media pluralism as well as to the interests of a proper democratically-informed debate in the final hours of any campaign.

What started off as an apparent case of persecution of one of our columnists on Friday night turned into a full-blown witch-hunt that a significant yet still unknown number of people posting election-related sentiments on the Internet being hauled in by the police for questioning.  The whole episode is condemnable.

We can understand that the police are compelled to investigate criminal complaints and the law, however incompatible with the realities of this day and age it may be, must be enforced. But the problem is that if that law were to be enforced to the full, several hundred people would have been questioned by the police yesterday.

It is incomprehensible, for example, that election-related articles and opinion pieces uploaded to our website on Thursday, the day before the period of reflection became effective, are still there for anyone to access and read but that anything uploaded after midnight becomes illegal.

The social media and blogs have been rife with political comment, not to mention one particularly nasty, and false, accusation against a family member of a prominent politician. This latter instance is a case for criminal investigation but surely those people freely speaking their mind on the Internet should not be made to face the wrath of the law. This is absolutely ridiculous in today’s connected world, connectivity that all political parties endorse so wholeheartedly.

In today’s age of instantaneous information, it is time that the country’s policy toward the period of silence is wiped from the statute books and sent into the annals of history where it belongs.