It is hard to tell whether Opposition leader Adrian Delia’s New Way has fallen flat or whether it is still trying to find its feet. Either way, the New Way does not appear to be making any inroads whatsoever with the electorate.

It is true that this was the new PN leader’s first litmus test at the electoral polls, and truth be told, no one expected the man to have pulled off any impossible feats, such as beating the Labour Party as it continues to ride the crest of a wave of electoral popularity.

One, however, would not have expected the electoral margin separating the country’s two main political parties to have widened quite as significantly as it did in these last double local council and European parliamentary elections.

The results bode none too well for the Nationalist Party and, more importantly, they do not bode very well at all as far as the health of our democracy is concerned.

Having a strong opposition is one of main underpinnings of having a strong democracy. Not only is a strong opposition able to challenge the government and keep it in check, but it is also collaborates with the government and provides essential input on the drafting of new laws and policies.

This holds true even if the country were to have the greatest, fairest, most honest government in the country’s history, which it certainly does not have. 

And as such, the opposition’s role is essential even more so in the current day and age the country is living in, in which the authorities fail to prosecute or even investigate the documented multiple misdeeds perpetrated by members of the government, in which the government has castrated the institutions that are meant to protect citizen rights and uphold the laws of the land, and in which the authorities ignore basic democratic principles left, right and centre.

And while the Opposition has taken the government to task, in court and elsewhere, on a number of outstanding issues – such as the leader’s demands in court for the release of the infamous Egrant report and his case to rescind the hospitals deal, we find it difficult to fathom how the party will be able to stand up to the behemoth that the current government has become.

Nationalist Party executive committee president Mark Anthony Sammut was the only person to fall on his sword at Dar Ċentrali in the wake of the spectacular double defeat the party has suffered at the local council and European parliamentary polls.

And he did so in fine fashion, arguing that someone, somewhere needs to shoulder political responsibility and that mere cosmetics such as fine-tuning or a new marketing strategy were no longer a viable option.

Then, on the other hand, there is the party leader who, granted, has always said that these May elections would have no bearing on his status as Opposition and Nationalist Party leader, but who will hear no talk of any kind of confidence motion in his leadership, despite the party having suffered its most humiliating defeat in history.

He insisted that his position is still tenable despite the party’s horrid showing at the polls, saying such a decision was not his to make and that the party has its own structures and that a vote of no confidence in the leadership could be called.

He did not, however, say that he would himself consider calling a vote of conference instead so as to calm the restless people at Dar Ċentrali.

The problem is that this may be an internal party affair, but it is not wholly a party affair.   The country counts on the Opposition to fulfil its constitutional role to keep the government of the day in check, but its seems hardly able to keep its own party in check these days.

The country’s smaller parties seem to have lost out even worse in these last elections than the Nationalist Party, and that effectively leaves the government with a carte blanche to forge ahead with its machinations until the Opposition gets round to finding its feet, finding its socks, and pulling them up.