We easily forget that free and peaceful elections are a relatively recent development in our country, even when we were wallowing in political disorder and corruption.

The preparations, logistics and rallying of another election campaign are over. Over the past few weeks, we were subjected to a daily fare of party rallies at different venues all over Malta and Gozo with a set of prepared questions and prepared answers repeated from one place to another. However, a meaningful discussion of ideas, issues and choices was conspicuously absent from all multi-party activities, save for some eye-opening statements coming from ADPD and Arnold Cassola.

This campaign appeared surreal, void of the usual colourful rivalry, almost verging on the eerie, shadowed as it was, with spikes of Covid-19 numbers and the raging war in nearby Ukraine.

With the continual churning out of surveys by the independent media in the run-up to the election, it was no surprise that we had a growing apathy spreading among the electorate.

For a number of years, practically from the end of the last general elections, there was a great divide between the support enjoyed by the two main political parties. Needless to say, while the Labour Party was making the utmost of its power of incumbency up to the last moment, the PN, on the other hand, was over these years deeply mired in one internal stalemate or crisis after another. It was only just a few weeks before the election date was officially announced that it portrayed an apparent, though very fragile, united front.

Worse, the timing of the no less than five party stalwarts suddenly and unexpectedly deciding not to contest sparked a number of raging political controversies, conspiracies and raised more questions than it answered.

I always subscribed to the theory that any campaign springs to vibrant life and healthy rivalry when it is scientifically predicted that the final outcome is, well, too difficult if not impossible to predict, albeit with the minimal margin of error accompanying such prediction.

Any election closeness is definitely a factor in bringing voters to the polls, something which was strikingly absent in this election outcome. Analysing the voter turnout in a holistic manner, and taking into consideration all possible reasons and theories, it should be plain to see that we had few voters with instrumental concerns, that is a motivation to affect the outcome of the election as opposed to those with noninstrumental motivations who voted as self-interested expected payoff maximizers.

To my mind, the 2022 general elections demonstrated that campaigns do not matter any longer, in spite of any fancy political slogans or themes cunningly devised by the contesting political parties. In the course of the campaign period, the electorate did not show any particular or significant volatility.

We did not have a Labour Party going from a strong winning position at the outset of the campaign to one close to defeat with a few days to go, and then back to a pivotal vote share by election day. The Nationalist Party began as the weakened contestant and kept on being so, losing votes from one survey to another as the campaign developed, recording its worst result ever.

The lack of volatility that emerged during the campaign period was the result of the unique electoral atmosphere in which the campaign was conducted. We practically had an atmosphere free of any determinants and there was an absence of the traditional 'major issues'. Yes, the Nationalists did try to conjure up the greylisting as a major issue, as it also tried to do with the warped concept of 'good governance', but the general response or reaction to them was dismally poor and insignificant. Their national and international importance, as expounded on by the PN, failed to come through to the electorate.

Other issues surrounding health, education, infrastructure and the economy had been largely neutralised. Election campaigns, in my opinion, cannot be 'issue free', and this was one campaign where it was so, in spite of Labour's ingenious attempt of presenting to the electorate a major issue, being whether to continue moving forward or else going back to the past as lived under Nationalist administrations.

So the vacuum created by the absence of these 'major issues' was partly filled by alternative issues, such as a number of irregularities smacking of corruption, or circumventing the law, attributed to the respective party leaders and presented to the public by their party media. It is worth noting that these 'campaign issues' were hardly rated as public concerns in the days before the election was called.

Another clear point that emerged was the historic weakness of the Nationalist Party. Virtually nothing went right for it, which had suffered a steady erosion of its support from the time of its leadership change, a time when Adrian Delia appeared to be embarking on a redemption journey of the party. Unable to achieve internal party unity, Chris Peregrin proved to be an ineffectual campaigner.

On the other hand, the Labour Party was well aware that the electorate was becoming cynical and mistrusting of politicians. It consciously sought to rebuild voters' trust in politicians and in government. Its manifesto was relatively modest in scope and had to be achievable. In office, the Labour-led government had repeatedly emphasised that it had, indeed, kept its word on its previous electoral manifesto. Labour government was finally returned with an increased share of the vote in a general election in which the conservative opposition party ultimately collapsed.

But did it really make much difference whether the Nationalists or the Labourites form the government? Is not a major problem in Maltese politics the fact that, apart from style, personality and some historical details, there is so little real ideological difference between the two main parties? One positive element, perhaps the only one, of this new administration is that the old bureaucracy will be shaken up and a new team will try to govern Malta. For the sake of all of us, we should wish them well.

Dr Mark Said is an advocate