Let’s face it – they just don’t do General Elections like they used to. Anyone out there remember the good old 1980s? When neighbours would come hammering on your “persjani” in the dead of night, warning you that the “marmalja” was on its way, armed with pitchforks and flaming torches, and leaving a trail of fire and destruction in its wake?

Ah, those were the days: when men were men, and most of them had bodyguards… when people never went to Mass Meetings without a small arsenal of semi-automatic weaponry… and when the police wore full riot gear, and were unshackled by such new-fangled trivialities as the European Charter of Human Rights.
Today? Forget it. Our political parties, I am sorry to say, have all gone soft. Even Labour, which we used to rely on to provide a little excitement in our otherwise tranquil, uneventful lives… I mean honestly: did any of you watch the MLP conference last week? Well, I did, and as far as I was concerned, it may as well have been a charity coffee morning organised by the Malta branch of the Care Bears. There were no flags or handkerchiefs; no belts or buckles; no skinned rabbits, or hysterical shrieking from the the Ghaqda Nisa Socjalisti Menopawzali… and when Michael Woods stood up to chant “Viva l-Labour” like a good old-fashioned partisan moron, what happened? Why, the rest of the audience turned round and practically told him to shut up. Call that a General Conference? More like a public library convention…

Then there was Alfred Sant’s long-awaited comeback speech. Honestly: what a bore! I’ve heard more enthusiasm and brainless violence in a packet of Rice Crispies. There were no threats to bomb Brussels; no chorus of boos of the detested name “Go-o-o-o-nzi”; and to cap it all, not once did he even threaten to bite off anyone’s tongue. What the heck is going on? I mean, I know he’s been sort of unwell of late… but then again, what kind of lousy excuse is that to get all civilised on us?

If you ask me, it’s all this blasted foreign influence. And it can only get worse, let me tell you. For you see, the Malta Labour Party has now taken to inviting foreign politicians for all the world as though it’s no longer against the law to speak at an Opposition gathering. And just look at the guest-list, for crying out loud. Namby-pamby politicians, wearing namby-pamby jackets and ties, and all with namby-pamby little names like “Martin Schultz”, “Andy Pandy Johnson” and “Under Fog (Daqs) Rasmussen”… With riff-raff like that being given the run of the Glass Palace in Mile End, can we really be surprised when our politicians lose touch with their natural born killer grass-roots?

And it’s not just the MLP, either. No, it looks like the PN has gone all soft on us as well.
Personally, I remember a time when PN campaigns were meticulously planned with all the subtlety and Machiavellianism of Lucretia Borgia’s personal poisoner. There was secrecy and style, venom and spleen, cloaks and daggers, as well as ingenious, insidious and darkly diabolical political stratagems.
Now? Nothing of the kind. An election could be held as imminently as early March – just over four weeks away – and would you believe it? Nobody’s called me to instruct me when, how, why, at what time, for which candidates and in which precise numerical order I am expected to vote on election day. Come to think of it, I don’t even know who my street leader is. And why is no one sifting through my garbage to find out if I’m corresponding with “Laburisti” in secret? No indeed. The era of the two parties, locked in an endless Soviet-era Cold War of control freakery, is clearly at an end.

Worst of all is the sheer lack of imagination, style or aesthetic sense in those awful, awful campaign billboards of theirs. The other day I was driving on the Birkirkara Bypass, and saw what I took at first to be an advert for some paracetamol-based painkiller… until I realised that the woman in poster wasn’t suffering from a toothache. She was just ugly.
But the most painful bit was the slogan: “If Labour had its way, you would now have 10% less money in the bank…”

What, you call that an election winner? Sorry folks, but if you really want to strike a mortal blow, you’re going to have to come up with something slightly… well… scarier than the possible consequences of the no-longer-even-possible devaluation of a now-defunct currency.
I suggest the PN digs deep into its fundamentalist roots, to come up with something truly cataclysmic and Apocalyptic for a change. How about: “If Labour comes to power, there will be plagues of frogs and locusts, a hail of fire and brimstone, water will turn into blood, and the Angel of Death will strike your first-born sons dead on the first Full Moon after Jum Il-Helsien”?
Or better still: “If Labour wins, all citizens will be required to carry on their person a holy picture of Our Lady instead of an ID card, by order of the newly installed Minister for the Inherent Inability to Pass an Exam without Divine Intervention: Dr Michael Falzon.”
Hang on, I’ve got it! “If Labour wins the next election, you will all be invited to a free, 24-hour live marathon performance by… drums rolling… LA BAROKKA!!”

Hey, wait! Where are you all running off to? Come back! I was only joking, I swear…

But back to the real slogan: which, if you’ll remember, involved an obscure reference to some fleeting promise of currency devaluation, from that distant, bygone age when we still had something called the “Maltese lira”.
Of course, it is completely immaterial to point out that the Nationalist government under Prime Minister Richard Ca… I mean, Eddie Fenech Adami… had itself devalued the Maltese lira: not once, but twice. (Which means that… erm… you already have 20% less money in your bank account than you did in 1990.)
No, the problem is another. For – apart from being nowhere near scary enough to make you want to vote for the most anally-retentive Christian democrat political movement since Pope Constantine the Constipated – the PN’s strategy is a fine example of what philosophers, logicians and other pains in the backside would call “infinite regression”: a rather apt term, applied to a party which has “infinitely regressed” since its present, religious leadership took over in 2004.

It goes something like this: if history happened differently from the way it really happened, then we wouldn’t be where we are today, with effects and results that are entirely impossible to envisage or predict.
For instance: if, in 1992, the Labour general council had elected Lino Spiteri instead of Alfred Sant as party leader, the MLP would no doubt have embraced considerably different policies in the run-up to the 1996 elections, with results which may well have pre-emptively nullified an entire decade’s worth of political controversy surrounding EU membership.
But even this is debatable: for if the same Labour party had been successful way back in 1956 – when its leader, St Dominic the Saviour, was advocating integration with Britain instead of Libya – well, chances are we would by now have already been members of the European Union for over 40 years.
Again, however, this is questionable stuff: for what would have happened if St Dominic never split with Sir Paul Boffa in the first place? Or if, in 1923, Colonel William Savona decided to open a snooker hall instead of a Socialist Party? Or, for that matter, if the Turks actually won the Great Siege?

And on it goes. In fact, with enough patience and free time on your hands, you can extend the same exercise backwards in time as far as (around) 7.5 million BC, whereupon you could well end up with a campaign slogan not unlike the following:
“If the dominant Alpha Male of a troop of baboon-like East African primates did not get horny at the sight of a large, ripe and particularly radiant purple bottom, which happened to belong to a female of the same species whose genetic code turned out to be just slightly different from his own… well, the human race would never have evolved at all, and you wouldn’t be reading this campaign slogan to begin with.”

Yes, that will bring the votes just crashing right in, now wouldn’t it…