So it seems that we’re back to the old ways on the political front.

Yesterday, the leaders of both political parties delivered their Sunday sermons. They had both done so in the lead-up to the local council election campaign, except for Easter Sunday. That much is expected on the eve of an election.

But, before that, there was a period of time in which the Nationalist Party has chosen not to be present on Sunday mornings. It had said it was taking a step back to give the people a break from politics. It hinted that the Labour Party should follow suit, if Prime Minister Joseph Muscat really believed that Malta was having an overdose of politics.

At the time Joseph Muscat was speaking of a highly-polarised nation and one that is always in election mode because of frequent elections. He was making this argument to counter the Nationalist Party’s insistence that the 2015 local council elections should be held. And yet, at the time, he chose to continue preaching every Sunday.

And so for a time Maltese politics was engulfed in one of its regular contradictions – we had a party in opposition, which is normally more interested in making its presence felt, choosing to miss out on one of the best occasions for media coverage, and a party in government saying the country was too gripped in politics but which retained its Sunday morning activities.

Now we’re back to where we were before.

The Nationalist Party ‘returned’ to the old ways yesterday, and it is likely that it will continue in this vein, at least until the hotter months.

It may have realised that it was committing a mistake in not being present on Sundays. The Labour Party was getting media coverage in the Sunday news bulletins – at a time when many people are at home watching TV – while the PN was not getting any. Absence from the news portals and Monday newspapers was also hitting hard.

The PN may have also been strengthened by the local council results, which saw it halve the distance it had with Labour when compared to the same elections three years ago. The 2015 result was the first real sign that the PN is “back in business” – to use Simon Busuttil’s own words – and so there may have been a change of policy so as not to lose momentum.

What is sure is that, whether we’re four years away from an election or very close to it, politics in Malta remains a hot topic in the media, in workplaces and around tables at home or in bars.

The choice of the venues by both parties yesterday was certainly not by coincidence either. The Nationalist Party chose St Paul’s Bay, a locality the PN snatched back from the Labour Party in the last elections. The Labour Party chose Nadur, where it was close to snatching a win which would have been significant for a variety of reasons.