In a classic scene from Yes Minister, Sir Humphrey Appleby quipped that government, that is cabinet, is not a team but a “loose confederation of warring tribes”. He could have been describing the melodrama, personality clashes and amoeba-like behaviour characterising the birth of new political parties in Malta.

I do not share the view that the two-party system has served our country as badly as those clamouring to break it up suggest. With all the missteps, violent detours and dark periods, the two parties careened this pink speck on the British colonial map forward and parked it as a thriving and prosperous member of the European Union. Bruised and battered? Sure. Still engaged in sterile debates over who should take credit for what? Sure again. But, in the end, we got here in just six decades. In historical and decolonisation time, that’s quite a feat.

All the hysteria to the contrary, liberal democracy does not preclude a two-party system from curating the will of the people any less than three or more parties do. Around the world there are as many successes as failures of both systems, leading to an iron-clad conclusion: it all depends on the country’s history, culture, economy and society. I prefer to call it collective consciousness.

Factually, Maltese voters seem to do most of their cautious electoral experimenting, including by not voting, in European and local council elections. When it comes to national elections, they choose differently and perhaps understandably so.

Electoral results don’t lie. At least till now, Maltese voters have not been overeager to elect third parties in national elections. This remains the case even though – apart from the contentious quantum of the national threshold – the system actually favours these parties. And, yet, Alternattiva Demokratika has been valiantly but unsuccessfully trying to win a humble national parliamentary seat for over a third of a century.

Electoral results don’t lie

Significantly, this overarching voting trend remains largely in place even in elections to the European parliament, when the country counts as one district and without a threshold barrier. In those held last June, all third parties and independent candidates together polled less than 13 per cent of the vote. Essentially, in local elections in which there is no threshold either, the same pattern persists.

Parsing further, the raison d’etre of a political party in a national election is to run the country. That’s not quite the same as running a pressure group, even a successful one. A liberal democracy is designed to be run by politicians, not activists. Both are necessary for the system to thrive and closely reflect the public’s will. Yet, the two cannot and should not be interchangeable.

Consequently, like the two main parties, third ones should be expected to have studied and credible policy proposals for all national sectors. To adapt a phrase, both activists and political parties campaign in poetry. Yet, only the latter would need to switch to prose once in power. Difficult as it might be to admit, governing Malta well is mostly about taking the boring right decisions and then do your best to make them sound exciting to rally support.

This brings us to the key challenge third parties face. To implement their policy proposals, it is not enough for them to get elected. If that’s where they stop, they’ll end up like Father McKenzie in The Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby – writing sermons that no one will hear. Without power or the prospect of it, politics become the stuff of a tepid debating society.

Logically then, third parties need to win enough seats to either give outside support to a minority government or join a coalition one. Potentially, however, such a scenario could pose a built-in and palpable governance issue. With power to bring down a government, a third party disproportionately and artificially amplifies its mandate way beyond its relatively small electoral base. In a worst-case scenario, government instability will remain uncomfortably close to parliament’s table.

To be clear, minority and coalition governments are not fickle by definition. It’s just that prospective voters for third parties do not and cannot know what ‘their’ party will do with power when faced with the hard and boring decisions on national issues, the bread and butter of daily politics.

In this sense, closer to the election, would it make sense for all political parties to declare which party they would be prepared to form a coalition with or give outside support to?

Lou Bondi is a strategic communications consultant.