The first five days

The first five days of the electoral campaign are a good indicator of what is to come, bar the ever-present possibility of a tactical bomb detonating on either side of the barricades.

Interestingly, the Labour Party – which had all the advantages because it is the Prime Minister who calls the election when he pleases – seems unprepared to me despite the ‘starting-gun’ logistical arrangements of billboards being ready for use as soon as the announcement was made, and internet advertisements flooding everything we look at online. Apart from that, the Labour Party’s campaign looks and feels slipshod and hasty, as though they were the ones caught on the back foot. The glitz and glamour, the organisation down to the most minute detail, the hordes of antsy teenagers crowding round the hero-leader – those are now conspicuous by their absence from a campaign that couldn’t be more different to that of 2013.

Yes, the Labour Party had the major advantage of knowing the general election date when the Nationalist Party (and the country) did not, but this doesn’t seem to have helped it much. I am left with the impression that the general election was to be held soon after Malta’s EU Council presidency ends on 30 June, but for some reason – a reason we should all be looking for; I can’t repeat this often enough – it was brought forward by several weeks, and whatever made that imperative is much more important than the government’s need or desire to play out its much-vaunted EU presidency in serenity, concentrating on those objectives.

Whatever the lurking nightmare-in-the-cupboard might be that has driven Joseph Muscat to ruin Malta’s EU presidency with a tense election campaign, Parliament in dissolution and a caretaker government which has no mind for anything else other than campaigning, it is scary enough to have left the Labour Party without sufficient time to prepare. Yes, they are more prepared than the Nationalist Party, but considering their advantage of advance knowledge, we can say that they are not really prepared at all.

The proposals which the Labour Party has put forward so far seem almost random, as though its policy-wonks took a long break and were substituted instead by a focus group of chancers brainstorming on what would get most random votes on the chaotic principle of promise-now-work-out-howto-deliver-later. That was the very same principle which drove Alfred Sant’s successful 1996 campaign into a concrete wall starting the day after victory, when he promised to re- move VAT without knowing how he could possibly do this (he couldn’t, and was voted out 22 months later).

The Labour Party’s billboards, too, seem to have been hastily conceived, at least so far – so hastily, in fact, that one of them even had a glaring error that wasn’t picked up at any point between conception, design, print and pasting: PHd. It was only after all those posters were up and were immediately pilloried that the mistake was corrected. The posters were taken down, and new ones printed and put up, at considerable expense. But then Labour probably still have quite a fancy war chest, though it feels a little as though they don’t have quite as much money to spend this time round, somehow. Perhaps the heavyhitters are less keen to bankroll them now, who knows.

Compare and contrast with 2013, when the Labour Party’s billboards were carefully planned and laid out according to a well-defined strategy. They even had people we know on them, telling us that they had decided to vote Labour because Joseph emanates rays of glory and sunshine. The likelihood that Labour will be able to persuade anybody to do the same for them this time is next to zero. From what we have seen so far, it is as though Muscat can’t even get his own ministers or chief of staff to be seen with him in the campaign. So all right, the chief of staff and Konrad Mizzi – who was so special in 2013 – are probably being hidden deliberately because they are now highly toxic. But what about the rest? Surely Christian Cardona doesn’t have any high moral principles about being seen on the campaign trail tacked to Muscat’s coat-tails? But then perhaps Muscat doesn’t want him there himself, because of the ever-present risk of an FKK Acapulco question from the posse of reporters that are now following him around.

Which brings us to emergency exits: Muscat has been avoiding the press for quite a while, dodging here and diving there, or leaving through some back door. An election campaign presents him with a major problem: this is when political leaders have to actively court the press to get as much attention as possible and to get their message across. So there can be no running away. Five days into the campaign and he’s already clearly under stress from the questions he's been avoiding for some time now. Let’s see how he handles the other four weeks.