The National Pastry Strategy

In 2022, Robert Abela stood on the steps of Castille with the political equivalent of a towering bastion behind him.

Forty thousand plus votes, a majority so large it looked less like a democratic outcome and more like a geological feature.

Never mind that Joseph Muscat had done it before him, Abela was grinning like the cat that got the cream. And the milk. And the Ġbejna. And the ftira with which to mop them all up, though I suspect his tastes tend to run to more refined confection.

Labour’s triumphalism, still resounding within their lick-spittle brown-nosers, brought us to the brink of Trumpian autocracy, where electoral victory gives you carte blanche to do anything. Flog citizenship, for example, or ride out corruption charges and worse.

This was never an unknown frame of mind within Labour, as those who survived the 70s and 80s recall. But entropy bites and the sweetness of resounding victory eventually turns, like rancid milk.

A survey now puts Labour ahead by roughly 7,500 votes: about 48.2% for Labour and 45.6% for the PN. A lead of just 2.6 percentage points.

In normal democracies, that would still count as a comfortable advantage, unless you’re used to having to vote for The Boss or no-one, meaning that The Boss gets in on a landslide.

In Maltese politics, where never let it be said that anything is normal, it registers as a pretty seismic tremor, even if Abela still goes around with that grin permanently plastered on his phizog.

Awkwardly for him, the figure sits comfortably inside a normal pollster’s margin of error. The once-colossal majority now floats in that statistical twilight where numbers begin to resemble educated guesses. You might also call it a photo-finish.

For Castille, it’s not yet a crisis. But it is unmistakably a warning light. And when warning lights appear, governments run by entitled youths who assume they are the only ones who can do it do not resort to introspection. They reach for the Treasury, batting Clyde Caruana away.

And so begins what might politely be called the National Pastry Strategy.

When voter enthusiasm begins to wobble, Labour doubles down on generosity with the enthusiasm of a village feast organiser.

Suddenly there are tax refunds, rebates on everything, electricity subsidies, fuel price freezes, family benefits, property incentives, grants for businesses, schemes for first-time buyers, cost-of-living cheques and consultations for programmes that somehow get announced before the consultation has finished. Or even started.

Petrol and diesel prices remain frozen with the fiscal bravery normally associated with avid guests of a Las Vegas casino, allowing the great, the good and everyone else to ‘’sail’’ to Sicily and back on our euros.

Press conferences multiply like rabbits to promote governance by ladled pastry, iced buns flying around like drones over Middle Eastern skies. The logic is brutally simple: if voters appear less enchanted than before, increase the sugar content of public policy and, dang, out the vote will be got. That’s why the sugar bowl will find itself at the centre of the table.

Abela’s problem is not so much voters defecting as voters drifting away from the polling booth altogether. Roughly 13% of Labour voters from 2022 now say they would not vote, compared with about 6% of PN voters.

So, the first bun delights. The second reassures. The third reminds voters that life under the current administration is pleasantly subsidised. And so on.

What might be worrying Abela is that by the tenth bun, the electorate will begin to wonder whether the confectioner might be trying to distract them from something.

The awkward truth about political pastries is that they are never free.

Someone eventually pays for the flour, the sugar, and the electricity needed to keep the ovens running. And eventually, even the ones who think that Joseph Muscat and his legacy are the best thing since…sliced iced buns…might start wondering whether they’re the ones who will be lumbered with the tab.

Rebuilding a forty‑thousand‑vote majority with subsidies, rebates and electoral confectionery is not cheap. Abela must be asking himself how many iced buns will it take.

Maybe, just maybe, voters are starting to realise that what looked like generosity was simply their own money being handed back to them in small, sugary instalments.

Abela thinks he will get the applause, Clyde Caruana knows the price of it, and ‘we, the people’ can see that we’re getting the bill.