In my 50 years or so of journalism I can remember at least two times when I got an election wrong.

In 1996, as editor of The Malta Business Weekly, I predicted a PN victory. It was not to be. It wasn’t the “photo finish” that Eddie Fenech Adami bluffed with when the dimensions of Alfred Sant ‘s win was yet unclear.

Only Godfrey Grima got it right, on the Financial Times and when you read his article later with a calm mind, you'd see he was right.

The next time was in the 2017 election when I let myself be carried away by the enthusiasm that Simon Busuttil generated in the PN crowds and let myself hope this could carry him over the threshold of Castille, as he kept repeating to the crowds.

It was not to be. Labour glided to a signal and historic victory.

And this time? Apart from consulting soothsayers or peering at tea leaves, the surveys, all of them, are predicting a massacre, a Labour victory to outdo all others.

There are other indications. On Thursday when Bernard Grech arrived in Palace Square, the only time he will probably speak in that square, he sat down with a face of one facing a shooting squad, a dead man walking.

Then gradually he recovered. Maybe it was the tiredness of a campaign that entailed five or six public appearances a day, with innumerable private meetings thrown in.

By the time this article gets printed and being read, the die will have been cast. Then will follow the usual ritual procedures – the winners getting their trophy and the losers again doing harakiri.

Then slowly life returns to normal and as we get ready for Passion Week, the Pope comes visiting. He will say Mass on an altar that commemorates the dead migrants at sea and will visit Malta ‘s least attractive tourist spot – the container village where we house the migrants.

The issues brought up by the campaign will remain with us, maybe not in the order of priority established by the campaign.

For many people the issue of corruption in high places may not have been the determining factor in choosing who to vote for but over time as Malta gets to face reactions in the international sphere and getting excluded as unreliable by the countries that matter most and as getting access to International funds becomes harder, maybe people will start thinking otherwise.

The country’s economy should worry us all, even if it did not seem to matter in the campaign as money was spent like there’s no tomorrow.

And people who rejoiced over the cheque titbit will have already spent them and hunger for more.

The one issue I can’t foresee from now is the very Maltese trait – the vengeance messages sent in the way people did not vote, or voted for some and left others out, or voted transversally. These are matters that only a close reading of the results will explain to us.

All the while in far-away Ukraine the guns are booming and people are dying. The invasion of Ukraine just did not feature in the election. I still cannot judge if that was a good thing or not but I know that now that the election is over bar the shouting, the invasion of Ukraine will start to matter more and more.

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