Winning isn’t everything, you know

I know I sound like an alien from Planet Zog when I say this: but ‘winning elections’ is not an end in itself.  It may very well seem that way to the parties and individual candidates involved: from their perspective, yes... ‘victory’ or ‘defeat’ could mean all the difference between ‘having a political career’, and ‘not having one’. 

But lift yourself out of that narrow space for even half a second, and a very different perspective swims into view. From this new vantage point, ‘winning elections’ only becomes important in view of what the winner actually intends to do once in power. The election outcome is no longer the end of a process resulting in either ‘victory’ or ‘defeat’: it is the beginning of another process, whereby both winner and loser will be judged on their subsequent performance in government or opposition. 

I thought I’d point this out because it is evident that all four of Malta’s political parties – not just the bigger ones – never experienced this simple shift of perspective themselves. Strangely, the people and organisations who will soon be asking for our vote seem entirely uninterested in ever looking at things from the point of view of the ordinary voter. Not just the disillusioned voter who is seriously debating whether it’s even worth the bother voting at all... but even the traditional party supporters whose votes are more or less in the bag anyway.

It is only the die-hard party militants who are ever attuned to battle-cries like ‘we will win’ or ‘we can win’, etc. The average voter may have individual, idiosyncratic political preferences of his own... but as we have seen in recent elections, these can no longer be taken for granted. The thousands who switched from PN to Labour were clearly not interested in a PN victory as an end in itself. If they were comfortable voting PN before, it was because they expected a certain standard of governance from that party. 

Yet when the Gonzi administration came up for re-election in 2013, it campaigned as though everyone’s survival hinged on its own electoral success. All the PN’s slogans could be boiled down into one: ‘Vote for us, otherwise the others will win’. Sorry, but that sort of approach only works with things like football, where supporter loyalty is expected as a matter of course (and even there it cannot be relied on forever). In contemporary politics - as the 2013 election so graphically illustrated - it is clearly nowhere near enough.

But it remains the official PN approach all the same. These, for instance, are all actual Simon Busuttil quotes over the past few years: “We still believe we have the potential to win the forthcoming election”. (Nov 2012) “We will be ready to win it – whenever it may be” (Sep 2016); “I’ve already beaten him [Joseph Muscat] once; I can do it again” (Sept 2016)  ‘PN closer than ever, can win next election’ (Oct 2016); ‘Maltatoday polls prove we can still win election’ (March 2017).

Right: I won’t go into whether our polls really do prove any such thing or not. I myself came to rather different conclusions looking at the same numbers... though I’ll admit I’m certainly no expert in such matters. But that’s beside the point, really.  The problem is that Busuttil seems to expect everyone to automatically share his own narrow political perspective: whereby winning is indeed the be-all and end-all of everything.

Even at the best of times, that is a dangerous way to go about an electoral campaign. Given the PN’s actual electoral circumstances – as of 2013 it has around 18,000 voters to win back just to draw level – it is not merely useless, but massively counter-productive. 

To win those votes back, you need primarily to look at things from the perspective of a disillusioned Nationalist... not your own perspective as a politician desperate for power. You have to put yourself in the shoes of all the people who actually came to the clean opposite conclusion in 2013: the ones who decided that ‘better let the others win this time round’. 

What do those voters care about Busuttil’s own appraisals of his chances? Why should they be expected to share the PN leader’s enthusiasm for a PN win... when they themselves voted the PN out of power only four years ago?

Personally, I find it mesmerising that someone so hell-bent on winning an election has clearly never even thought about appealing to the one voter segment he can’t realistically win without. But then again, I can’t exactly claim to be surprised, either.

Naturally the same principle applies to Labour, though it probably won’t be as seriously tested any time soon. You might not find as many equivalent direct ‘I will win’ quotes from Joseph Muscat... but that’s probably because he is (unwisely) taking his own victory as a foregone conclusion. But he does exude exactly the same kind of ‘victory-or-bust’ swagger as Busuttil. And like Gonzi before 2013 (though to a lesser extent), his party is also haemorrhaging votes as it fails to live up to expectations. 

With Muscat, however, the attitude is even more misplaced than with Busuttil. He doesn’t have to win those voters back; all he has to do is retain them. Many would have voted Labour precisely because of their meritocracy and transparency pledges... so they will not be impressed by confident assertions of a guaranteed Labour victory, either. There was a reason they wanted a Labour win in 2013. And it wasn’t ‘because otherwise someone else would win instead’...

These voters will now be asking the same question I asked earlier. Why is it important for one party and not the other to win, anyway? What will actually change as a result? From where I’m standing, there is no satisfactory answer. Whether you vote for one party or the other, what you will certainly get is the same corrupt system they have both propped up for decades.

But enough of the two bigger parties. What I find more interesting right now is that even the smaller parties seem to be falling into the same perspective trap. There are signs that they, too, are beginning to think that ‘getting elected to Parliament’ is an end in itself. Sorry, folks, but... no, it isn’t. I belong to the voter segment that is likeliest to vote for ‘alternative parties’. But it’s not a foregone conclusion. I for one see no reason to elect third or fourth parties to Parliament, if they will simply be absorbed by one of the two bigger parties, with no tangible results to show for it.

When I interviewed Marlene Farrugia recently, I asked her why she was contemplating a coalition with the PN. Her answer was remarkably similar to what I’d have expected from Muscat or Busuttil. ‘Because that’s the only way a small party can have a realistic chance of winning a seat and forming part of government’.

Erm.. yeah, OK, but to what end?  Why should the electorate prefer a PN government with Marlene Farrugia in its ranks... when that is what it had before 2013 anyway?  The PD leader’s answer is once again very similar to Gonzi’s in the last election. This is an exact quote: ‘Labour must not win the next election’. 

So it’s basically ‘vote for us to keep the others out’, all over again...

Meanwhile, former AD chairman Michael Briguglio recently floated the idea of a coalition between AD and PN, too: specifically saying that “AD should consider and investigate a pre-electoral coalition so that it would have a real chance of being elected in parliament whilst doing away with the 'wasted vote’ preoccupation of so many voters who agree with the Greens but who choose a bigger party so as not to give advantage to another bigger party which they would not want in Government.”

To be fair, it was more a suggestion than an actual initiative – and to the best of my knowledge, the party itself is not contemplating a coalition. But if you look at the reasoning underpinning the argument, it begins to look very familiar. 

Like Farrugia, Briguglio presents a ‘coalition’ as the only feasible way a small party like AD can win a seat. To which my objection remains the same: but why the heck should we want AD in parliament, anyway... if it’s only going to be there to prop up a Nationalist government of the kind we rejected only five years ago?

Sorry once again (third apology this article), but ‘to keep Labour out’ is just not a good enough answer... least of all now, when we can all see with our eyes that on governance issues there is not a shred of difference between them. So my message to AD, PD, PL, PN, and anyone else who only ever seems to think in terms of their own political interest... change your perspective. We are not looking at the same picture.