This country is geared towards enjoyment, an easy lifestyle helped by an agreeable climate, blue seas and opportunities to mix work and play. Its attractiveness is based on relentless optimism which is, we may say, the national belief.

It has never been conquered, at least in the past 300 years, and has thus no memory of being a subject people. From being a colony of sorts it attained independence, then became a republic and saw the end of the British military presence.

It was always promised the best of all worlds even if many times this was pure spin and if comparison with other countries showed deficiencies ably masked by spin.

Its recent history shows that only one of its past rulers dared telling it the truth, and he was roundly hated for that. This was Dom Mintoff and his hard-Left approach brought about his eventual downfall.

In contrast, the Opposition brought back optimism. Those who remember those days should remember the huge sigh of relief that accompanied the end of the Mintoff austerity, the over-regulation of trade and commerce, the dark nights of the streets, the inefficient telephone system, and the water cuts.

With the end of the Mintoff years in 1987 came years of plenty as trade was liberalised, the hated import substitution system wound down and you did not have to run to Sicily to stock up on toothpaste.

Besides, the Opposition was promising the ultimate panacea – membership of the European Union, promised as the ultimate guarantor of the free and easy lifestyle so beloved by the Maltese. No thorns, no sacrifices, and above all joining the European lifestyle as peers, sitting around the table where decisions were taken.

But the improvement was only surface-thin. The lower cohorts remained poor, the government machine remained anchored in its byzantine past, as inefficient as ever.

In education, the doors were opened to all those who wanted higher education both locally and abroad but otherwise in the lower forms and especially in State schools a huge mass continued to emerge with only basic skills, if any, and the amount of children who just stopped going to school was around the European record.

Fast forward to our years. We have now had eight years of a Labour administration that has succeeded itself believing that the second wave was a discontinuation of the now-discredited first wave.

The leitmotif now is still that of relentless optimism, over and above everything. Of course, the obvious reason is the approaching election: without this basic optimism, the game is wide open.

The polls and the spin on them are part and parcel of this relentless optimism drive helped by the unfortunate fact that the Opposition seems unable to come up with contrasting surveys and equally unable to shed those who are reinforcing the negative spin. From party dinosaurs to ineffective party officials living on past memories. The party leader is badly served by those around him and contributes to the mess by his own mistakes and short-termism.

The approaching Christmas festivities are seeing a ramping up of collective optimism – from streets lit up like never before, to City Gate turned into a Christmas village, to a compliant TVM saying on Kuncizzjoni day that Valletta was chock-a-block with shoppers (while YouTube reports from Malta, maybe not on the same day, say Valletta was strangely quiet with few people).

The same is happening all over the world as the Omicron variant rages rampant. Christmas is being cancelled in country after country. Any emerging respite is being wiped out. These countries are blaming the unvaccinated but this surely is not the case in Malta given the high levels of the vaccinated. Yet people are still catching the virus here.

At post offices, hard-working staff cannot cope with a tidal wave of packets from low-cost internet companies that are replacing shops and outlets on our streets.

The relentless optimism drive would like us to believe that our economy is on safe grounds as members of the national glee club from the Governor of the Central Bank to the FIAU and the various authorities would have us believe and that we will soon come out of the grey-listing gloom. Then you look further and find out that our deficit is at a European high, that the number of people at the risk of poverty and people on food help or living in garages has risen again.

The relentless optimism would have us believe that the issues relating to the rule of law are being addressed but we can all see the investigations into the killing of Daphne Caruana Galizia and related issues getting beached on the shores of an impossible court system.

We are hitting a wall anywhere we turn. Only the blind cannot see that. The determinedly blind.

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