Editorial: Reforms neither party wants to discuss

Four decades ago, New York governor Mario Cuomo coined the phrase: “You campaign in poetry, and you govern in prose”.

Political leaders must choose their poetry carefully because the words they use before an election become the promises they are expected to keep afterwards.

This electoral campaign has featured no shortage of mellifluous rhetoric, theatrics and populist pledges aimed at winning over an electorate showing increasing disillusionment with politics.

Both Labour and the Nationalist Party are making promises that often escape serious cost-analysis scrutiny at a time of global economic uncertainty, especially with no clear outcome of the Iran war.

Much of the campaign has focused on courting younger voters. Proposals range from substantial increases in student stipends and tax incentives for Maltese professionals returning from abroad to exemptions on overtime and part-time work intended to encourage locals to fill labour gaps. The PN has even pledged to exempt young people from paying income tax for five years on earnings of up to €50,000 annually.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Robert Abela remains ambivalent on Malta’s growing dependence on imported labour. While insisting that economic prosperity depends on increasing production through foreign workers, he also wants to exclude around 100,000 third-country nationals from Labour’s proposed €1,000 annual ‘super bonus’.

The list of electoral bonanzas seems never-ending. The PN is promising tax cuts for low-income earners, including a minimum tax rebate of €1,200, while Labour has pledged car grants of up to €12,000 for families.

Healthcare, meanwhile, remains one of the public’s greatest concerns. Labour is promising increased grants for older adults, expanded cancer screening programmes, further investment in Mater Dei Hospital, improved support for live-in carers, extended IVF services and continued pension reforms.

The PN, for its part, is promising a complete overhaul of public healthcare services, including new hospitals and health centres to ease pressure on Mater Dei. Unsurprisingly, it argues that Labour has lost credibility on healthcare management following the failed privatisation deal involving three public hospitals over the past decade.

Yet despite the flood of promises, neither party has convincingly explained how it intends to tackle the deeper concerns weighing on people’s daily lives: overstretched public services and infrastructure, traffic congestion, rampant construction, inflation – particularly in the property market –and rapid environmental degradation. And whatever happened to the problem of corruption?

Labour continues to defend an economic model driven by increasing production rather than productivity, despite repeated warnings from the IMF that such growth is unsustainable because it strains infrastructure and public services. The government knows that structural economic reforms are necessary, but it also knows they are politically painful. So they are completely digging their head in the sand.

The PN, meanwhile, argues that projects in the pipeline will sustain high growth and continued labour demand. At the same time, it is also seeking to reassure the business community, which generally favours fewer restrictions on imported labour. In reality, the Hurd’s Bank fuel proposal is the one PN proposal worth exploring in detail.

In the absence of more candid discussion about the country’s real challenges, the structural reforms Malta urgently needs risk remaining unaddressed. And we are not optimistic they will be tackled in the last two weeks of the campaign.

This week, former Malta Chamber president Marisa Xuereb warned voters to take flashy electoral pledges with a pinch of salt because the next five years will be difficult regardless of who wins.

She is right. Whoever forms the next government will eventually have to bridge the gap between electoral idealism and the hard prose of governing.