Just a little more than a year has passed and we are back in election mode. We have become like the Italians, with an election every year.

The parties are back, with meetings taking place during mornings and evenings, and with accusations, charges and counter charges turning the air blue. One big party (the Nationalist one) is still so skint following its election defeat last year that, wonder of wonders, it has been surpassed by Alternattiva with one billboard to its O quota.

And we find ourselves immersed in this campaign when this election is not important at all, considering that our meagre total of six MEPs will not have much of an effect amongst a sea of 700 of their counterparts. And there’s every likelihood that our MEPs, spread between PES and EPP, will find themselves sidelined in the expected inroads of the eurosceptics and Far Right candidates.

Nor will it have a bearing or impact on our national government, except indirectly and more on the schoolyard taunting mode than anything else. The Nationalists will be out to see if the excess votes that put Labour in power are still there or not and the Labourites will peer to see if Simon Busuttil looks like being a serious party leader in view of the 2018 election.

For like any other country, only the national elections matter. The rest – European Parliament, local elections or what have you – are at best irrelevant.

It is grotesque to think otherwise, to give the 24 May election an importance it does not have.

Obviously, if PN get three seats to Labour’s three, that may seem like an advance for them, but on a closer reading, it does not. The previous election, the 2009 one, gave Labour four seats by the slimmest of margins. Even without considering demographic changes, population movement, voter fatigue and so forth, a 3-3 result would be a very small advance, if that. And, given the numbers, to turn last time’s 4-2 to 2-4 this time, requires a massive vote shift that may even be bigger than last year’s tsunami shift towards Labour.

So on 26 May, do not expect any earth-shaking changes. Most probably, the noise on that day will regard the bigger pan-European picture, probably in this case, the relentless advance of the Eurosceptic vote.

Obviously, the parties here will try their best to spin whatever they get as a victory. Like most things in this country, spin will win on 26 May and the gullible viewers will react as they will be programmed to react.

Politics lack the clear cut verdicts that football has: in football, a goal is a goal is a goal. In politics, a defeat can be construed as a victory. Remember Lawrence Gonzi’s vain boast after such an MEP election defeat that he could lose such a vote but then win the general election? It is only in a general election, and then only in Malta’s case, that you get a clear winner and a clear loser.

It is completely absurd for the Nationalists to try and depict the 24 May vote almost as a re-run of last year’s general election. While one understands where this urge comes from, it also shows how they have not understood the dynamics that led to the defeat last year.

The past weeks have shown the Labour leader running circles around the Nationalists not just on the petty strategic levels, but also on the broader level of politics in general. The Nationalist leader has a long, long way to go.

There has been, over the past weeks if not months, a careful dosage of social issues alternating with more mundane and political issues that deal with the economy.

On the one hand, government promoted a spurt of liberalising moves that split the country between those ‘who walked with history’ and those who ‘missed out on that opportunity’.

While letting the sides battle that out, the government continued with its management of the economy, its macro-economic decisions, such as they were.

The country did not notice this was being done, and the Nationalists were too taken up fighting the social issues to notice the more purely political decisions that were being taken.

It was easy for the Labour leader to portray the Nationalists as split between those who refused any modernisation on the social level and those who would have wanted to move ahead, and so posit a split inside the party.

The Nationalist Party has always had a split personality in most of its history and has learnt to handle that. Labour too had its splits, but they became civil wars; fights to the death.

The government has been helped by the economic results, such as last week’s Eurostat confirmation that the government has attained the Maastricht criteria level as regards the deficit.

To this, shamefully, the Nationalists had nothing to counteract with and its statement by its Deputy Leader and its former Finance Minister showed clearly that they understood nothing of the figures in the Eurostat release and most probably, they understand nothing of macroeconomics.

For the Eurostat release showed not just that the debt has shot up, but also that government expenditure has shot up too (as one would expect with so many finding jobs with the new government). The Nationalist leader never once referred to the economy in the speeches he made over the past days, when he could have had a field day.

The next appointment is in just a few weeks, when the Commission issues its upgrade report on the Excessive Deficit Procedure that Malta is still under (end of May – beginning of June) when the EDP can be lifted. While that will be after the MEP elections, it will set the tone for the coming months, long after the excitement of the MEP elections has worn off.

There are other issues that must be examined and to which the government could be held accountable, such as the situation in the health sector, where the government has acknowledged the insufficiency of the past year’s efforts and has brought in a new person. Or the Foreign Direct Investment issue. Or the infrastructural needs of the country. Or even foreign policy in such a turbulent time.

Instead, all we get are schoolyard taunts and catcalls; the personalisation of issues in an area where there is enough material for a political debate without all this interfering noise. Apart from anything else, this personalisation of politics poisons the whole political atmosphere.

Fundamentally, however, I am starting to become very pessimistic about the democratic structure of our country, based on this gadarene rush to get the figures. In our elections, we make the sick walk to the polling booth, we get people from abroad, there is this paroxysm of getting every last vote, and votes are clearly bought and sold. Last year, we had a meticulous vote-harvesting effort by Labour that is now showing its obnoxious side, especially with regards to the property sector.

Democracy has become getting a majority of votes, no matter how. With a majority of votes, we have seen an incredible arrogance and a lack of respect of the Opposition. I admit this sort of thing went on under the Gonzi-Gatt administration, but never to this extent. So, opinions harden and extreme opinions hold sway. There is, among the Nationalist supporters, a refusal to see any, if any, good things done by this administration. It’s back to schoolyard taunts again.

Soon, we will see the structures of society, from the Law Courts to those bodies who statutorily must be independent, coming under siege and predictably, they will prove to be weak when under government pressure.

When that happens, the rot will have set much earlier.

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