When Alfred Sant lost his last election as party leader in 2008, he attributed his defeat to his rival party’s “power of incumbency”. Less than 2,000 votes separated the two parties. He argued that if the PN did not enjoy the benefits of entering the competition as the champion, rather than as the challenger, they would have lost. Without going into the merits of that specific case, you’d think that such an accusation would have sparked some debate and some changes made since then to improve the rules of the game.

No such thing.

Setting a date for a general election (which in Malta is more of a plebiscite about which party wins all than a choice of parliamentary representatives) is still exclusively in the gift of the prime minister. Every time the fourth year of a term expires, we get mind games and guessing games as everyone tries to work out what the prime minister is thinking and the prime minister delights in toying with everyone.

The prime minister is head of a dying government but also leader of the party that wants to compete to run the new one. That’s an inbuilt unfair advantage which should rightly belong to no party leader.

Even the UK, from whom we inherited this delightful quirk, has since moved to fixed-term parliaments.

It’s not just that it’s not fair that one of the runners in a race gets to fire the starting gun. It’s the unnecessary economic uncertainty this creates every time, not to mention the extended bureaucratic chaos in public administration and the opportunity for abuse as the government party conducts an undeclared war.

Consider the Great Metro Campaign that must have cost the equivalent of a new train station. Ethical public expenditure would not consume government money on promoting initiatives and projects that cannot or are not meant to start within a government’s term.

The principle is that if the Labour Party wants to persuade us to vote for it to get a metro sometime in the future, it should be the Labour Party that pays for the publicity, not the government. That’s not to say that the Labour Party should not have public funds to communicate its ideas as long as money also goes to other parties that can give us alternative visions of a post-electoral future. Some would say that’s the point of having a democracy.

The current abuse of public funds for ruling-party propaganda is both unfair and wasteful. The government commented recently that if the people want the bonanza promised in the finance minister’s budget speech to be implemented, they will need to vote Labour again. That’s a staggering admission that the budget process was not an administrative and legal process as required by our constitution. It was, instead, purely partisan and propagandistic.

There is no oversight over the use of the government’s assets for the campaigning of incumbent ministers and parties- Manuel Delia

Essentially, they used the finance ministry and hundreds of public sector employees and millions in public funds to draw up an electoral programme and disseminate it. They conducted a party conference in the parliamentary chamber with the leadership of the Nationalist Party as a kidnapped audience. That’s the behaviour of a one-party state, the ultimate abuse of incumbency.

It’s not just the finance minister’s televised urbi et orbi. Consider all those closed-door ‘consultations’ with interest groups, ostensibly in preparation of a budget the government does not intend to implement. Under cover of official engagements, the ruling party trades votes and interest support against promises of post-electoral returns, without scrutiny or regulations to manage lobbying.

There are other implications of the prime minister’s power to conduct a campaign without officially declaring it first. When a campaign formally starts, convention requires a freeze on civil service promotions and it becomes politically harder to award direct orders for public expense. Even for Labour, that has no qualms about breaking its own rules, the longer they can postpone that deadline, the longer they can indulge in corruption to their advantage.

Whether before or after an election is called, our rules are flimsy and, where they exist, they are ignored. There is no oversight over the use of the government’s assets for the campaigning of incumbent ministers and parties. Ministries become constituency offices. Official cars are used for electoral purposes. Government computers, phones and staff are mobilised as party agents funded by public money.

If I sound preachy, it does not mean I am personally entirely innocent of some of these complaints. We should still be grown up enough to evolve out of this abuse that is more typical of false democracies.

It can’t just be a matter of updating our laws. Not when we ignore the laws that we do have in place already. It is already illegal to bribe voters with free food and drink, not to mention promises of some post-electoral reward like a job or a permit. Few realise that house visits by candidates are not meant to be markets for the trading of unlawful favours.

The issue then is empowering those that are meant to enforce the laws. Conduct in elections is regulated by the Electoral Commission. Conduct on the media is regulated by the Broadcasting Authority. Look closely at who runs those agencies and you’ll find the PL and the PN.

That’s useful to have an umpire to make sure the game is fair at least after the prime minister decides it is time to fire the starting gun. We need more than that. We need independent oversight to ensure that all candidates follow rules in the public interest, even when the rules – better rules – restrict the behaviour of all participants to fair and democratic conduct.