In many ways, Malta on the eve of the 2022 general elections is a different place than Malta was on the eve of the 2017 ballot. If we were to speak to our past selves, we’d shock ourselves.

Daphne Caruana Galizia? She’s dead, killed by a car bomb. Joseph Muscat? He’s resigned and the police have been to his house rummaging in his kids’ school bags. Konrad Mizzi? He’s dodging questions like his life or liberty depended on it. Keith Schembri? No one admits ever knowing him. Roberta Metsola? She’s president of the European Parliament. Simon Busuttil? He’s retired from local politics and is working in Brussels now. Who’s leader of the PN then? Someone called Bernard Grech. Who? And you haven’t heard of Adrian Delia, have you? Nor have you heard of Yorgen Fenech, Melvyn Theuma, the Degiorgio brothers, the Maksars, il-Koħħu ...

Yes, Malta changed a lot in this one term of parliament.

It is remarkable to me that all the questions the last general election was supposed to have answered once and for all remain open today.

I recall Muscat’s emphatic speech in Castille Square the day he announced a June election. He said Malta needed to regain global credibility. Truth about the Egrant scandal and the correct conduct of Pilatus Bank needed to assert itself with urgency. The government needed a strong mandate to rebuff Russian intervention.

Do you remember that Muscat had said President Vladimir Putin planted a secretary at Pilatus because Malta had refused Russia’s ships refuelling?

The election achieved none of these declared political targets.

We are greylisted by the FATF and our voice in defence of our old way of behaving on the world stage is hoarse and largely ignored. Pilatus was shut down and charged by the local authorities with heinous crimes.

But as if a bank can commit crimes while its owners and directors remain oblivious, no one yet has charged anyone who could drag Muscat down. Just in case.

The only spy-work in connection with the whistleblower at Pilatus was the government’s efforts to smoke her out of hiding.

She had to be protected by the courts of another country to avoid a fate similar to the journalist she provided information to.

Meanwhile, the warlike Russian fleet sails our waters quite indifferent to what we might think about it.

Like gamblers on losing streaks, powerful people who saw their evil plans go sour in 2016 hoped a single strike of good luck would reverse their fortunes. First, they bet on the 2017 election: that a resounding landslide for Labour would shut up the critics and give them a licence to thrill. When that didn’t work, they pegged their hopes on the car bomb that killed Daphne.

It was a double or nothing gamble. It didn’t pay off.

Here we are on the eve of another election and the desperate push their borrowed credit on a single number again. They hope that this election will save them, unlike the one before. They hope that a thumping victory for Labour will exhaust the critics who refused to tire out in 2017.

They hope the witnesses who refused to be cowed by a car bomb will be intimidated instead by the enormous futility of facing the undimming power of Labour. They hope that no police officer, no magistrate, no prosecutor, no judge, no journalist, no opposition politician will ever again dare search in the schoolbags of the children of the untouchables.

‘Forty thousand’ they say, warning their opponents to shut up- Manuel Delia

These are the bullies who refuse to understand their victims. They are the colonists who assume rebels will stop loving their country if they’ve been beaten often enough. They are the husbands who assume their wives will comply if served a regular and healthy dose of violence to remind them of their place. They are the schoolyard bullies who develop an entitlement for the lunch money of their victims they think will never speak up. And when a beating doesn’t shut up their victim, they hand down a bigger one.

Since 2017, Labour has stopped approaching elections as something they want to win. They have long stopped being about getting more votes than their opponents so they can govern securely. Since 2017, elections have become battlefields that create enough fog to cover the most emphatic trouncing of anything and anyone in their way.

You can see it in the background rhetoric, especially online. Nobody aspires to a Labour victory because their party will, say, narrow the wealth gap, improve education or health or do something, anything, that could be described as a policy one might subscribe to. It’s not about government as much as about forcing traitors to keep to their place.

‘Forty thousand’ they say, warning their opponents that, once the result of the next election is known, they’ll have no choice but to shut up, perhaps leave the country. They don’t necessarily address that to the opposition in the wider sense as much as to Times of Malta, to Daphne’s sons, to Repubblika, to Metsola, to Newsbook and Lovin Malta, to the louder Nationalist MPs, to anyone, that is, that still refuses to prostrate themselves and swear them allegiance.

Instead of a festival of public debate, a competition of policies, a competence contest of prospective national administrators, elections since 2017 have become acts of forceful intimidation, their outcome a foregone conclusion, only the extent and vehemence of the defeat a trickle to tease a small measure of interest.

I find myself nostalgic for election campaigns that let us choose between a party that was pro-Europe and a party that was against. I chide my older self for wishing for a consensus over such an important thing. I now long for a time when Labour campaigned to defeat the Nationalists because they disagreed with them.

Now, Labour contest elections to crush all those they hate. Brace for it.