One week down, four to go.  Malta’s electoral campaign properly kicked off in the past week.  Party machinery clicked into gear soon after Prime Minister Robert Abela announced that the country would go to the polls on 26 March.

Press conference and party activities have followed, as have the first set of proposals in the PL’s case and even the general election manifesto in the PN’s case.

There has been much to analyse in this first week.  The battlelines are slowly being drawn; the strategies are coming into play, and the first punches are being thrown.

The PN has made sure to show people how it has come flying out of the box when compared to the PL, while the PL is biding it’s time slowly but still showing that it’s chosen one particular topic as an essential rallying call in its path towards what they hope to be re-election for the third time in a row.

However, in some aspects, the week has been dominated by events other than proposals and party activities. 

The PN’s plague of failing to appear like a united party reared its head once again, while the PL has its own headache to deal with in the form of a still hugely idolised ex-Prime Minister.

Many initially thought that the main extenuating factor from the election would be the Covid-19 pandemic – but it appears that the international overshadower will be Russia waging war in Ukraine.

This is all analysed by The Malta Independent in its roundup of the first week of electoral campaigning.

 

Both parties were ready to go from the off

With a week gone from the electoral campaign, it is quite clear that both the PL and the PN were at ready at the starting blocks even before Robert Abela sounded the claxon for the campaign to begin.

One would have, naturally, expected the PL to be good to go whenever Abela announced the electoral date, and in fact even before the announcement came just over a week ago you could tell that something was afoot with the already-branded placards ready and waiting for the party faithful who were to be in attendance.

However, it is clear that the PN was also ready to go.  Perhaps it’s no surprise that they are given that the election has been strongly rumoured to take place ever since last November.

But still, the party – much maligned in recent years for being woefully disorganised and uncoordinated at times – almost immediately launched their electoral branding, wheeled out their first tranche of campaign billboards, and, before the week’s end, announced their electoral manifesto.

Chris Fearne, deputising for Robert Abela at a PL campaign activity on Thursday, tried to claim that it was clear that the PN was not prepared for the election – namely due to their candidate woes (more on that later).

It probably didn’t help his cause that he was making that statement at the same time the PN published their 550-point strong manifesto.

The first week has shown us that if Abela’s intention was to catch the PN off guard by announcing a short electoral campaign on a date which wasn’t necessarily expected – given its proximity to the Pope’s visit to Malta – it hasn’t worked.

PN have been quicker out of the blocks than PL, but could it backfire?

So much has the PN not been caught off guard, as we’ve already said, that the party has already published its sprawling electoral roadmap and has made sure it is present in localities all across the island.

The PL by comparison has bided its time, particularly when it comes to measures.  They announced some measures of significance at the beginning of the week and simply spent the rest of the week building on those – much like they had done in 2017.

It’s a more measured approach than the PN’s rush to get their proposals out of Dar Centrali’s doors.

The PN’s strategy merits analysis here: on one hand, one of the prime intentions behind it is surely to show people that the party is ready for the electoral campaign and, ergo, is organised enough to be able to govern.  On the other hand, though, one must question whether the party has shown too much of its hand, too early.

While the PN have said that there are still more ideas to be published, it will be curious to see whether the party can keep pace with the PL from a proposal perspective when the PL does get into the gear.

Labour goes green as it makes environment its battle-cry

As they kicked their own campaign off, it is quite clear that the PL has decided to make the environment its main priority.

Indeed, one of their flagship proposals was that they would dedicate €700 million - €100 million per year – to environmental projects, effectively copying the same blueprint that Joseph Muscat’s PL used when it came to road infrastructure.

The question here however is, can the PL make people believe that they actually have the credibility to carry this out properly?

While the roads infrastructure promise came at a time when the people were quite fed up of the PN administration’s track record for shoddy roadworks which took and age and a half to be anywhere near finished, this promise comes at a time when people are fed up of the PL’s own nonchalance when it comes to the deterioration of Malta’s environment, particularly as sometimes it has been the bringer of that same deterioration itself.

Other decisions – or u-turns – taken in the past week such as that to take back a tranche of land in Zonqor from the American University of Malta and to cancel a tender issued last summer for a marina in Marsascala Bay were no doubt intended to try and build the PL’s environmental credibility.

Will it work though? It’s quite clear that many people are fed up with the way Malta’s environment has been treated in years gone by. 

Early indications, at least on the echo chamber that is social media, are that not many people really believe that the PL can make Malta’s environment better – but likewise not many believe that the PN, whose own disastrous planning policies were the enabler for the current frantic development to start, has the credibility to solve much either, despite their own proposals.

This battle for green credibility seems to be set up to be one of the main ones which will dominate the campaign.

United we stand… ?

The concept of unity is one which both the PL and the PN have strived to use in the past months.

Both their slogans – ‘Malta Flimkien’ for the PL, and ‘Mieghek. Ghal Malta’ for the PN – build on that concept, with the main message behind both slogans being a projection of togetherness in favour of the good of the country.

And yet, the first week of the campaign has been dominated by efforts by both parties trying to show that their respective adversary is in fact divided.

Internal rifts and divisions have been a hallmark of the PN for the past five years, and – even though the party has gotten a hold of itself since Bernard Grech took over as leader – those rifts appeared to rear their heads again in the first days of the campaign.

The withdrawal of three established candidates in Clyde Puli, Kristy Debono, and Mario Galea on pretty much the first day of the campaign will have done nothing to help the party. 

Grech has tried to explain away the withdrawals, but try as he might no explanation masks the fact that these were three Pro-Delia MPs and that they withdrew at pretty much the same time to the point that the act can be considered as deliberate and coordinated in timing.

That has only provided fuel for the fire which the PL media machinery has prolonged for months, if not years now.

In the PL camp on the other hand, much has been said about the re-appearance of former Prime Minister Joseph Muscat on the campaign trail.  Muscat had largely withdrawn from public eye since he resigned in disgrace at the end of 2019, but he has cropped up on the campaign trail this past week.

The PN’s own media machinery has jumped on this and used it as an attempt to show how the PL is going through its own power struggle and how more of the party supports Muscat than it does Robert Abela – to the point that news that Muscat attended a party event in Marsaxlokk one morning was treated by NET as a scandal-worthy piece of exclusive news.

Muscat himself has insisted not to let anyone use him to instil division within the PL, but there is reason to believe that he is a headache to Abela.

First of all, Muscat is endorsing particular candidates. The choice over who he chooses to endorse and who he doesn’t may swing in ways that Abela wouldn’t necessarily be pleased with.  For instance, Muscat spent his Saturday morning in Birgu lapping up supporters’ adoration with Glenn Bedingfield – who is competing on that district against, amongst others, Robert Abela’s sister-in-law Alison Zerafa Civelli.

Secondly, the more Muscat involves himself in the electoral campaign, the more attention may be afforded to him – and that is something that could, and most likely would, come to the detriment of Abela himself.

That in itself is not something which will negatively affect PL grassroot support, but those PL supporters who were perhaps uncomfortable with Muscat’s leadership of the party may not welcome his increased involvement, and that may transfer itself onto the ballot sheet.

Little hope for smaller parties

There was for a time some genuine hope that 2022 may be the year when one of the smaller political parties at least gets closer to making it into Parliament.

But alas, as the electoral campaign kicks off, it is quite clear that there is little hope of this happening.

The merger of AD with PD was initially a beacon of some hope, but the withdrawal of many of its star individuals such as Marlene Farrugia, Godfrey Farrugia and Camilla Appelgren has left the party looking like an extension of AD, with the same faces and the same people involved as always.

The party has offered little in the first week save for an admittedly snazzy sounding slogan – Green sweeps clean – and it’s unlikely that they would be able to capitalise on any more support than usual.

Volt Malta was another new party which initially projected itself to be the go-to party for Malta’s liberal class, having said, for instance, straight off the bat that it is pro-choice.  However, come election time, the party has only managed to muster a single candidate for the election… far from the liberal hope it wanted to be.

The Popular Party meanwhile appears to be going down the same route to political irrelevance as their right-wing counterparts Moviment Patrijotti Maltin did in 2017 – although at least an effort in this new party’s branding means that they’ll look better while getting there.

This is backed up by survey numbers: ADPD have barely registered a 2% share, while neither Volt nor the Popular Party have registered in any survey to date.

An electoral campaign overshadowed

It would have taken a lot to overshadow any electoral campaign in Malta, let alone a general election which has been mooted for so long.

And yet, with the war which Russia has started waging in Ukraine, that is exactly what has happened.

The invasion has vastly reduced the attention of the Maltese public on the election, with many perhaps rightly realising that the usual childlike political jibes pale in comparison to the very real events happening in Ukraine.

No doubt the campaign is going to continue to feature in the newsreels till the election comes, and it will also no doubt leave its own local mark.

The PN has already used the conflict as a means of criticising Abela, with Grech going as far as suggesting that Abela is putting the country’s safety in jeopardy by refusing to stop citizenship sales to Russian nationals.

With the European Commission promising action against countries – such as Malta – which host passport selling schemes, it will be interesting to see the reactions of both leaders: Abela has been a staunch defender of the scheme, and Grech has tactically positioned himself on the fence – speaking out against citizenship for Russian nationals, but including the IIP scheme in his party’s manifesto.

The government’s own response to the war will also be under the microscope.

Abela telling party faithful how grateful he is that he lives in a country as serene and peaceful as Malta in times like this is tone deaf at best. 

Likewise, the police’s decision to clear up after a peaceful Ukrainian demonstration outside the Russian embassy – effectively doing the Russians’ bidding in removing anti-Putin and pro-Ukraine messages – drew ire over the weekend.

Grech must avoid making himself seem like he is using a war for political gain (a line he is already dangerously close to crossing), while Abela – as Prime Minister – must make sure he takes all the necessary decisions against Russia’s despicable aggression.

Live everything else in this campaign, it’s a going to be a fine balancing act.