My eleventh

This is my 11th general election as both a voter and a media person. The first was in 1971 when, as a teenage reporter struggling to even understand the whole electoral process, I watched history unfold. Malta had been through some turbulent times earlier

The Sixties had started with an ignominious politico-religious dispute that had families split down the middle, and gone on to the acquisition of, arguably, a funny sort of independence, and the development of new ideas in the fields of culture, literature, economics, the media, fashion and sport as the new generation took on its manifestly shocked predecessors. Change was in the air everywhere in the world and Malta was getting into the act too.

As the 1971, 1976, 1981, 1987, 1992, 1996, 1998, 2003, 2008 and 2013 now mentally flash by as if they have all just been a psychedelic dream, I have been trying to fathom this election campaign we are experiencing. I can honestly say there have been quieter, fiercer, hotter, more, and less, predictable campaigns than this one. What certainly makes the 2017 campaign unique is the contrast that comes out from observing what the major parties are saying and how they are saying it.

It is a recognised fact that there has never been an Opposition as negative as that which the recently dissolved Maltese Parliament, in its new, classroom environment, has seen during the past four years. This realisation becomes even more telling when one considers it has taken place at a time when Malta was making headway in all sectors, breaking employment, tourism, investment, rights and services records by the day. While the Opposition has understandably chosen to keep an active eye on corruption perceptions, no doubt nurtured by an inbred addiction to it, not once did it feel the need to acknowledge this undoubted success.

Lost in a self-inflicted quagmire of allegations and third-party claims and without a single, remote hint of proof, it has preferred to stick to the theme. It could hardly do otherwise given that the country and its people continue to bask in the glow of economic accomplishment. The result, sadly, has been the mounting of a vicious PN campaign based on personal hatred, the use of combustible language and even the condemnable dropping of hints spiced with obvious antidemocratic ingredients.

One has to be politically blind and fanatically brainwashed not to see what the vast majority of people in these islands are witnessing – an election campaign that clearly balances the positivity of a successful Prime Minister and his national movement with the malicious onslaught from a party in Opposition that continues to hate the very fact it has been sentenced to be in Opposition. It makes a very ugly picture. No one expects political adversaries to agree on anything during an electoral campaign, but to reduce one side of the whole political dialogue to a series of screaming, foul-mouthed declarations and vitriolic is practically a new and worrying development in Maltese politics.

Nationalist hatred of Labour leaders, of course, is not new. At the very same institution where