Is the public moving away from the main parties?

I know even journalists are allowed time off around these festive times. So dedicating page after page to looking back in anger or looking forward with eager anticipation, ignoring the reality that disappointment will ensue, is not such a sin.

One such feature in The Times of Malta caught my eye within 24 hours of 2026. I’m no expert on the esoteric subjects discussed, except maybe as an erstwhile loudmouth commentator on politics, for all that my Beck column seems to be remembered for its culinary tailing more than much else. Such is the fare of vapid political comment, I suppose.

Having a trawl through the piece, it came to light that Malta’s problems are apparently no longer political “in the classical sense”. Which is convenient in the “click’n’move on” age, because classical politics requires ideas, restraint, and a vague interest in the public good.

Most people today wouldn’t recognise classical politics if Aristotle explained it to them using flashcards.

It is being touted that the classic left-right divide is obsolete.

Could be, but maybe only because robust debate has been hollowed out and repurposed as a prop. A rhetorical toy. Something to wave about while doing whatever was already decided behind closed doors. Ideology here is not a guide. It is an alibi.

Instead, the function of governing has become “technical and administrative”. Is that a lament or an indictment? It should mean that governing now requires competence. Expertise. People who know what they are doing.

But instead, we survive within a political system built around loyalty, patronage, and the ability to survive internal party knife fights.

Ministers, it is sometimes said, without a trace of cheeked tongue, still carry political responsibility.

Buzz, wrong answer.  What we have is theatre. Responsibility, of whatever stripe, in Malta is endlessly deferred, carefully diluted, and eventually forgotten. The buck does not stop at the minister’s desk. It is bounced. Diverted. Rebranded. And, when necessary, buried under a consultant’s report no one intends to read, though the consultant does send the invoice.

Then there is the deeper rot: The confusion between party, whichever one is chosen for the sake of immediate convenience, and State. Many people do not merely support a Party. They belong to it. They love it. Love it more than institutions, more than rules, more than the idea that the State should function independently of Party advantage. Few, very few, apply considered thought to choosing which to support, and fewer still do that for anything other than transitory expediency.

How else would so many people with deep pockets convince themselves to align with those to whom no one decent should ever have aligned themselves? The hold-outs shine with integrity. But it is not these of whom I write. It is of the “proset ministru” clan.

For these and their ilk, whatever serves the Party must serve the country. Criticism becomes betrayal. Oversight becomes sabotage. Accountability becomes a foreign concept. The State shrinks. The Party swells. And governance is reduced to tribal management.

The consequence is not political engagement but political exhaustion. People are not withdrawing because they are lazy or cynical. They are withdrawing because participation has been stripped of meaning. Debate changes nothing. Evidence counts for little. Outcomes are predetermined.

At one end, those politicians drone on, mistaking repetition for persuasion, photo-ops for engagement and volume for authority. At the other, the issues that actually shape people’s lives, such as housing, health, planning, wages, are mangled beyond recognition or quietly ignored.

So yes,  I suppose you could say that the public is moving away from the main parties. Not because decent people stopped caring, but because they understood the rules of the game. And once you realise that the game is rigged, the temptation to walk away is strong.

Many don’t, especially around the sixteenth of every month, but many, too many, have, preferring to flourish in denial.