My positive vote

Before every election the scaremongers target potential AD voters putting on them the responsibility of handing over Malta to the devil.

Joseph Muscat's Labour Party has many faults but it is an anachronism to resort to the kind of scaremongering which depicts Labour as a risk to democracy or Malta's European credentials.

Just as the PL contains people who made very wrong choices in the past, a person who voted against the divorce bill ignoring the result of a democratic referendum leads the PN.

Come March 10, if Labour finds itself in government, it will probably be business as usual for the usual big business interests and powerful lobbies like land speculators, hunters and armier squatters but it we will not on the brink of Armegeddon. 

Moreover it extremely unlikely that with the PN which starts defending a meagre 1,500-vote margin, can turn this election around. In some ways this gives voters a greater freedom to vote according to the whims of conscience, fully knowing that the dye is already cast.

Neither is the PN the devil incarnate, which we have to exorcise by some divine command by voting Labour in to ensure that Gonzi is humiliated. 

The PN has done plenty of mistakes especially in its failure to enact a party financing bill and a whistleblower's act despite having promised to do so five years ago. It also practices a system of political patronage, which is unhealthy for both democracy and the economy.

But let's face it" on a macro level we have survived one of the worse economic crises facing the world, mostly thanks to the prudence of our banking system but also to the fact that we joined the euro in 2008 and thus were obliged to keep finances in check.

Still a change would not do harm to a party which has been in government since 1987 except for Sant's two year's spell. 

Rather than anger at the other two parties, my motivation to vote for the Greens is largely positive, based on an electoral programme with which I agree, which includes the progressive stances like gay marriage and the decriminalisation of drug use, which are in line with foreword looking global policy thinking coupled with the Geens' traditional commitment for transparency and environmentally sound policies.

Through this campaign the Greens have deliberately refused to participate in the electoral auction and have been the only party to insist on the need of responsible finances. 

They have also shown maturity refraining from shooting down any proposal made by the other parties, welcoming both the night tariff proposed by the PN and the shift to gas proposed by the PL while questioning the two year time frame and underlining the need of a public tender.

Surely I have my strong motivation not to vote for any of the other two parties but that alone would only have led me to stay at home and not vote at all. 

Labour has not convinced me for the sheer reason that it has tailored its discourse around what is appealing to a number of categories that were considered to be most likely to switch from the PN to the PL. 

In this way it made a number of choices, preferring hunters and speculators to environmentalists, preferring business interests to genuine social concerns like raising the minimum wage. I am also flabbergasted at Labour's first major commitment on a major project: that of issuing an expression of interest instead of a public tender for a private power station which will provide us with 40% of our energy needs for 25 years. Neither can I vote for a party whose leader replied in the affirmative when asked point blank whether he agrees with  "pushbacks" of asylum seekers to Libya if it is declared "safe" and whose 20-point plan on immigration hints at the suspension of international obligations if Malta is full up.

Muscat's discourse against tribalism is welcome but has to be seen in the context of an electoral strategy; a way to convince former Nationalists that they can feel included. But this is also coupled by the cultivation of a personal cult around a "messianic" figure, based on a kind of adulation, which insults my intelligence.  

The Nationalist party does not deserve to be re-elected in power. It has thrown away its only redemptive feature; that of sheltering Malta from the international storm around us by dishing its fiscal prudence and suddenly turning in to Father Xmas. It has sent the wrong message that everything is now possible.

So people naturally ask; how come the clouds have cleared simply because an election is taking place next week? Through this campaign the PN has excelled in the role of pot calling the kettle black. The same party, which extended development boundaries, now condemns Labour's links with developers. The same party, which did not move a finger to move a party financing law, now protests at being over spent by Labour. The same party indebted to Zaren Vassallo speaks about Labour's debt to its new financers.

Moreover apart calling the kettle black it is trying to present itself as brand new ditching its own recent past. The same party, which takes scandal at the risk posed by the two massive gas cylinders, proposed by Labour at Delimara, leads a government which kept the Marsa power station open in breach of EU regulations. The same party whose Prime Minister voted against divorce after the referendum and which failed to introduce a cohabitation bill first promised in 1998 now expects us to trust it to introduce civil partnerships for gay people. As if we can still believe them.

The same party, which expects us not to trust Muscat because of his recent anti-EU past expects us to trust it to introduce the civil liberties it opposed. This is commitment is being made by the same Prime Minister who secretly signed a commitment with the Armier squatters on the eve of the 2008 election when he was promising to redress the environmental deficit.

Thankfully the election is not being contested by the two behemoths alone. 

Alternattiva Demokratika should be praised for carrying the banner of progressive and reasonable politics in this election. Voting does not have to be a cynical exercise in choosing the lesser evil. It can be a joyful moment of freedom when one feels in tune with the inner voice of conscience in the hope of making history; that of electing a third party in parliament for the first time since 1962 and thus join the rest of Europe where multiparty democracies are the norm.