The Labour Party is the ruin of the present. They know why. You know why. For the benefit of the inveterate hecklers, the institutionalised corruption that gripped the island in 2013 is the mother of the lawlessness, the amorality, the irrepressible greed, the steroids pumped into the underlying conditions of over-development and economic dependence on economic activities of uncertain provenance and less certain prospects.

The Nationalist Party is the ruin of our future. Its one job as a three-term opposition party is to give us hope that there’s a way out of the present disaster. It should be an oasis, even a mirage of one, that spurs us on, that distracts us from doubting whether it is worth believing a different future would come in place of this unending drought.

Those outside the Labour Party, and many even within it, can agree that the present administration is worse for having no fear of any end. For being a government, it is an obvious candidate for public scrutiny and criticism. More so for being a government that is in its 10th year. Even more so for having a soothed record of bribery, collusion, nepotism, simony and, perhaps worst of all, the disarming of the state institutions whose job it would have been to stop the bribery and the rest of it.

It is logical then that we should keep our sights on the misconduct of the party in government. There’s enough material there to fill newspapers every day many times over. Why dilute the focus of pressure on the government by indulging in observation and criticism of the opposition?

Choosing your battles sounds like good advice. And, yet, not having a home to return to makes it harder to fight in the trenches.

Holding the Labour government to account feels futile when people who agree it should go can’t imagine themselves replacing it.

You will, no doubt, ignore the fake tears of the occasional Labour Party leader bemoaning the poor state of the PN and regretting the harm to democracy because there is no viable alternative to the government. It’s their perverse way of being smug about their incidental immortality.

You will be wrong to ignore the confusion of voters who know the Labour Party needs unseating from power but don’t know how to do it.

The Nationalist Party, once the natural party of government, the locus of moderation, internationalism, tolerance and rational choice, presents itself as a somnolent auto-cannibal, an anticipatory disappointment, quite the opposite of the great white hope this country needs.

There will be some who might think that my criticism of the Nationalist Party is the product of resentment at its rare show of unity behind the anti-abortion banner. It is worth pointing out that the perceived unity in the Nationalist Party, even over this, is illusory. While marching behind banners sporting infants, critics of the opposition leadership whisper loudly.

Listen closely to those loud whispers behind the weary shoulders of Bernard Grech- Manuel Delia

Bernard Grech’s handpicked staff is infected by some sleeper virus that reduces their professional life expectancy to mere months. There are petitions making the rounds among PN councillors urging for the removal of the party leader. The rebels appear impatient even with the unspoken plan to wait until after a disaster in the European Parliament elections before staging their coup.

So what, you might well ask. A party that moves to replace an ineffective leader is a party that proves it is alive by acting on its instincts of self-preservation. If a tool does not work, you get another one.

Here comes the bit about the crumbling future.

Consider the doubtful future of France. Out of the ruins of the Socialist Party, the once glorious movement of Francois Mitterrand, and eating up the common-sense support of the Gaullists and the rest of the centre-right, rose the man in the middle, Emmanuel Macron.

Neither of the left, nor of the right, but driven, according to himself, by a rationality uninhibited by partisan traditions, Macron won elections on the back of a latter-day Bonapartism, a benevolent, rational despotism that relies on his good sense and his willingness to do good.

That’s all very well. But what happens next? What happens when Macron is not winning elections anymore? What fills the vacuum that he creates? Macron, focused on the present, shows few signs of caring that, almost inevitably, the palace he moves out of will lurch very hard to the right. Après moi, le déluge as it were.

Listen closely to those loud whispers behind Grech’s weary shoulders.

The whisperers are not the boring old windbags of the sensible though irritable grand old partit tal-avukati.

The whisperers are disaffected men, habitually vague about how they earn their living, disaffected as much by the government as they are by “their” party but more by the complex discourse of a politics they are utterly impatient with and by leaders that are too circumspect to excite them.

Those petitions and those whispers are calling for a strong leader – in their mind, no doubt, a man – someone who talks tough about foreigners, someone who can articulate his supporter’s anger at their exclusion, who can identify for their hatred the right sort of scapegoat, someone they can march behind and appear in the eyes of others as a strong, intimidating throng.

The whisperers want to belong to something that forces others to respect them. They think a hard lurch to the right might just be what realises their dreams. While we watch the future crumble.