Viewers who were watching Saturday’s L-Istrina right from the beginning saw a scene which many would have characterised as a rare scene in today’s Malta.

They saw the leaders of the two parties and their best halves greeting each other as friends, the women kissing each other and the males conversing amiably and laughing as they waited for the President.

It was a normal scene were it not for the small fact the two are at each other’s throats on a daily basis, with venom and aggressiveness being the order of the day.

The ‘normal’ viewer, if such a person exists, would be well justified to doubt what he or she was seeing. Then would ask: is this what I am seeing real? What is the state of the real relationship between these two?

With so many institutional meetings taking place over Christmas, the two would be hard put to face each other with a snarl, in the House and out of it.

But if words have any value at all, what these two leaders hurl at each other are not inconsequential. They accuse each other of the worst crimes in a functioning democracy – from corruption to scaremongering.

The fact is, and these Christmas days bring us face to face with it, that the good of the nation demands a better relationship between the leaders of the two main parties. They cannot be at each other’s necks all the year round.

Yet they must make the points their position demands. They have to be firm in what they declare and ready to commit their parties to what they profess to believe.

Many times, however, they let their feelings run away with them and they use very hard words to describe their opponent, words which once said cannot be retrieved.

To be fair, the amiable gentlemen we saw on Saturday do resemble more the two persons who lead this country. Certainly, the shouting, raving figures we sometimes see in Parliament do not resemble them at all. The latter are more like bad caricatures than real likenesses.

The previous day, on Friday, the two leaders were interviewed, separately, on Xarabank and here too they were shown in the homely context of their families. Here too, it was their human side that prevailed.

As the new year dawns, and as life returns to normal after the Christmas interlude, and as political life resumes, the country needs more of the former and less of the latter – the former being the amiable two persons we saw and the latter being the two raving cocks we see on television.