If re-elected to government, the PN has already planned to introduce several policies in education, health and welfare but will remain totally silent on them during the campaign.
As they are unpopular and painful, it has decided not to disclose them. They will not appear in the 2008 electoral programme. When it comes to analysing PN electoral campaigns, you learn more by what they do not say than by what they say.
Cabinet ministers who have voted in favour of these policies and approved their introduction have agreed that they are not to be mentioned in public, and that these unpopular and painful measures will only be introduced after the election. Top government officials who know of these policies in health, education and welfare have also been briefed to say nothing about these policies not to turn more voters against the PN.
Radical measures that have a strong impact on the national health scheme, the primary education system, welfare benefits and the working conditions of public sector employees are being carefully concealed from the electorate. Several unions and professional associations know of these measures and have expressed their opposition to them but they have decided not to speak about them in public as the PN electoral programme will say nothing about them.
The PN is concealing its real agenda once again in government. This is not the first time that the PN introduces unpopular measures that were never mentioned in the electoral campaign. In fact, the PN is keen to make people forget the pain it caused them since 2003 and is now trying to spread a good feel factor in the country till the election takes place.
During the referendum and general election campaigns in 2003 the Nationalist Party told voters that the country’s finances were in very good shape, that economic prosperity, a new way of doing politics, new civil rights, a better quality of life, a new everlasting spring, etc., were all round the corner… provided that the majority voted again for five more years of Nationalist Party government.
An increasing number of people who voted PN in 2003 feel cheated and betrayed. Instead of the “dawn of a new spring” they faced several harsh winters of higher taxes and bills for public utilities. Thousands of families and pensioners find it very hard to make ends meet and it has become more difficult for businesses to operate in a viable and sustainable way.
When presenting its government programme in May 2003, the PN promised to ensure that it was “intended to benefit all people without exception; not only in the sense that it rejects and steers clear of political division and partisan differences, but also that it promotes an ever more inclusive society.”
Since then a large number of Nationalist voters abandoned the party because they feel let down by their party. Talking to them I get the feeling that they believe it was not them who left the party but it was the party who left them. They feel left out as they do not belong the network of the well-connected in the PN. They feel angry at the arrogance shown by those who have been in power for nearly 20 years and disgusted by the way corruption has been allowed to spread and fester.
A sizeable segment of PN voters also feels let down by the PN promise of a new dawn in 2003, based on the repeated declaration that public finances were on sound footing. Once the general election of 2003 was over and won, instead of a new spring the PN rediscovered the old public deficit. The PN government started raising taxes and eroded families’ and pensioners’ purchasing power, bringing about a deterioration of their quality of life. This is not what they had promised during the election campaign. It was not the first time that the PN had tried to deceive the people.
In the summer of 1996 the Nationalist Party opted for an early election not to let the truth about the public deficit come out into the open. Former Minister John Dalli had warned Prime Minister Fenech Adami about the public deficit but during the 1996 election campaign, no mention was made of it. The PN promised to raise welfare benefits when it knew that it did not have the money to do so.
During the months of the referendum and general election campaigns in 2003, the Nationalist government did not publish any statistics about the state of public finances, as it wanted to conceal the fact they were growing. Meanwhile it mounted huge billboards saying the public finances were on a sound footing and its leaders claimed in their speeches that the deficit was being contained and reduced when the opposite was happening.
For the PN, the sound of silence is more eloquent than the nice promises they make on the eve of one election after another.