Editorial: Bridging electoral promises with realities

More than three decades ago, New York governor Mario Cuomo made a memorable political comment: “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.”

This sobering reality is as valid today as it was then. As the next general election in Malta approaches, we can expect our political leaders to try to curry favour with the electorate by making promises of what they can deliver if elected to govern the country for the next five years.

Electoral campaigns are rarely about defining socio-economic strategies at any reasonable level of detail. Transactional politics is so ingrained in our democracy that expecting our political leaders to outline the options and tough choices we face as a nation often leads to frustration. Instead, citizens are expected to decide which party to vote for based on the attractiveness of the package of promises that political leaders make.

Still, it is essential to test the credibility of political leaders by the sustainability of the promises they make. The new PN leader, Alex Borg, has made several interesting promises that his party would implement if it were to govern the country.

Perhaps the most prominent promise is that the PN would set the corporate tax in specific industries, such as hospitality, catering and retail, at 15 per cent. He also suggested that a new PN government would reduce VAT for all restaurants from 18 per cent to seven per cent.

The tourism industry remains one of the most crucial economic engines.

It employs tens of thousands of workers and generates substantial revenue not only for hotels and restaurants but also for many property owners who rent out their properties to visitors.

Still, one needs to ask whether the over-investment in mass tourism operations is indeed giving us the kind of socio-economic returns that we should expect. Isn’t it time to encourage investment in other sectors that add more value to the community?

Borg made another critical proposal meant to address Malta’s demographic crisis that Finance Minister Clyde Caruana has termed as the “greatest challenge of our time”. The PN proposes a new income tax band to give families with more than one child €8,500 a year.

On this issue, the positions of the government and the opposition are not different. Surely, when it comes to setting priorities, the next government must define concrete and substantial strategies to reverse the growing demographic time bomb.

These strategies must go beyond offering financial incentives to couples to encourage them to have more children. They must include labour market practices reforms and improved health and educational standard upgrades to ensure that our economy indeed becomes family-centric.

Both political parties must go beyond making electoral promises without showing how reductions in taxation and new popular benefits will be financed. Malta’s public debt is increasing at a very fast rate. The seriousness of this reality will become more obvious when the economy starts to cool down, as economic positive cycles do not last forever.

Borg, like Caruana, has a good understanding of the priorities that the next government will have to address: a tired economic model, over-reliance on mass tourism, daunting demographic challenges, over-dependence on imported labour and a growing debt mountain.

They also know that reforms will be painful and that bridging electoral promises with reality will mean pain for some.

Both political parties must resist the temptation to overpromise and underdeliver if they want the electorate to trust them with governing the country.

It is time to clearly define our priorities to ensure that the burden of socio-economic reform is shared equitably.