In an ideal world, an election manifesto would set out a political party's honest intentions about what it would do if it were in government. However, parties will always be tempted to overpromise to win votes, particularly regarding spending commitments.
Local party competition is becoming more like an auction, mainly because the PL and PN are seeking to buy elections through spending promises, turning them into bidding wars.
Our two main parties have, over the years, become ideologically indistinguishable from one another. In the absence of ideological competition, they compete with one another in terms of how much they are offering. They may promise more than is prudent given the available resources, in pursuit of short-term electoral gains.
The history of our nation's branding is at once long and short. We had the PL come up with a supposedly rallying motto of 'Team Malta' to lead the country forward toward a promised land of milk and honey, only for the PN to portray that it has all it takes to steer this small island of ours into a cornucopia and all-bliss age.
Over the years, we have devised a multitude of long-term strategies and visions for pivotal sectors of the country, the latest being Malta Vision 2050. However, these do hardly future-proof the sheer number of national and global issues we face, which can feel overwhelming.
The complexity is daunting, but we cannot fail to highlight the absence of a crucial skill for any leader to have the ability to prioritise what truly matters. It's about staying honest about the challenges we face, holding firm to our core values, and always striving to improve, even when the path forward isn't entirely clear.
To add insult to injury, our political leaders keep on promising us a 'quality' of life, something that has now become a stale buzzword and remains as elusive as ever.
We are equally promised a Gozo 'of villages' at a time when the sister island has already been irreversibly transformed into a single urban expansion.
Political commitment to sustainability, entrepreneurship and social welfare in Malta is fast fading away.
Yet, our nation's or society's false self-image is always a variation on that theme, and many of our politicians have mastered the art of feeding it. They repeat, in one form or another, "We are a great nation and a great people: good, courageous, caring, wise, hard-working, generous and just."
There is nothing wrong with these assertions in themselves. They are sometimes true. But when they form the core of a false self-image, such flattering affirmations suddenly become always true and never to be challenged. That self-image then sets the boundaries of permissible public debate. If facts contradict the conceit, the facts must be denied. If individuals contradict it, they must be denounced and forced to apologise. The politicians who defend false self-images pose as patriots, but their patriotism can turn deadly.
There is no danger in seeing where we're great; the danger is in not seeing where we're not great.
As citizens and as a society, we tend to spend more than we have, resorting to borrowing to make up the difference. When the debt becomes due, we continue to borrow more. We have one of the highest dropout rates in the EU. We pay more for health care than any other country, in part because we eat badly, exercise little and demand that the doctor undo the damage.
Some politicians will talk about these problems, and they deserve credit for that. But many of them perpetuate our false self-image of greatness in the solutions they present. Their programmes for "fixing" the deep problems in this country are a series of relatively painless marginal adjustments.
This approach of tiny remedies for big problems is not just part of our politics. It's become part of our culture.
Our political spectrum needs to take on board a broader coalition, aiming to create a narrative that is both robust and adaptable, with more stakeholders engaged not only in shaping the strategy but also in its implementation, ensuring it truly reflects Malta's strengths and future aspirations.
This country of ours needs to have strategies in place well before a crisis hits, along with robust monitoring systems to spot potential threats early. Our parties must start being proactive, building trust with the electorate so that when they need to respond, they know they can rely on the people's trust. If they're not telling the whole story and truth, someone else will, and their version may not be in their favour.
For many out there, for various reasons (soup kitchens, homelessness, construction mayhem, traffic nightmares, infrastructural mess and environmental degradation), they are close to living hell on earth.
Proposing minor remedies for big problems feeds the false self-image of greatness. If the remedy is minor, then we're convinced we're not that messed up and maybe even still great. But if the remedy is huge, it does us the double insult of saying we're not so great after all and we're just going to have to work harder and pay more to fix things, which is going to make us mad because we're exhausted and simply fed up.
As long as we demand that politicians flatter us about how great we are, we are forcing them to downplay both our problems and the difficulty of the solutions, and that puts the country in danger.
Dr Mark Said is a lawyer