This is incredibly impossible to say but it is Gospel truth.

The two political leaders, each speaking before a mammoth crowd in Mqabba and Zabbar respectively, without any pre-arranged coordination between them, both stepped on to the podium in the very same second and they both concluded their speech in the very same minute as each other.

The people at the respective mass meetings would not have known this but only those who were at home watching either on a computer with a split screen or had two televisions on in the same room can vouch for this.

This, and any attempt to describe and understand the general election in Malta shows the mirror image the two parties are of each other.

They are two big political parties with grass roots in every corner of the island, in every town or village, in every social class. Obviously, there are differences of shade and emphasis but beyond who is on top and who is in Opposition, they are ineradicable. Each has a hard core that will always be there, rain or shine, come what may.

It is not this core that makes a party victorious but the third party made up of those who do not reveal their voting preferences to pollsters – we call them the floaters, the undecided, the switchers.

This is the time these come into their own. The polls published yesterday and in previous weeks have all shown there is a big chunk of floaters who are, or say they are, still undecided if they are going to vote at all and who they will vote for. The votes cast by these will decide the election.

There is a huge difference between this election and the two preceding it. While in the previous two there was no over-riding concern, this time there is.

There is on the one hand a judgment on Joseph Muscat’s first term, his achievements but also the long list  scandals associated with him.

But now there is an even greater reason: the danger posed to our financial services sector (and the various other sectors connected to it, from the construction industry, the gaming industry, the internet providers, etc) by the world-wide tide of revulsion at our tax system which is being claimed as favouring tax avoidance on a grand scale by companies registered in Malta but operating elsewhere.

There is much that can be said in defence of Malta’s tax regime – the ones avoiding paying taxes many times do so on their own in their own countries, with no guidance from Malta – but the scandals involving Malta in recent years notably the Panama Papers and Malta having the only minister in the EU caught with an account in Panama have incredibly weakened Malta’s hand.

There is an urgent need now for a Maltese government to act quickly and credibly to persuade the world that the Maltese regime is not a tax haven, or encouraging tax evasion. But a government haunted by so many scandals it has been forced to forego a 36,000 and nine seat majority and call an election a year early, is in no shape to be the government Malta needs.