Day 2: (2) You don’t have to love them.

Mark Camilleri, an antediluvian Marxist, an inveterate Mintoffjan, a former delegate of the Labour Party, someone who voted for Joseph Muscat and was keen to see him made prime minister, declared yesterday that the country needs the PN to save it.

His logic is unimpeachable. He hasn’t started liking the PN. He just thinks, as many of us do, that the collapse of the rule of law is guaranteed to be completed by Labour’s re-election. The only thing less terrible than Labour winning again, is Labour losing to the PN.

No one should be under any illusion that this unimpeachable logic shifts trends in electoral behaviour in any significant number of people. Let no one get excited and start thinking that Mark Camilleri (and others will follow him in this) is some form of canary in Labour’s coal mine.

We’ve been through this in 2017. Dozens of high-profile people who had declared they would vote Labour before 2013, said they would vote PN in 2017 because they could not stomach the corruption in Labour’s government. The PN won the argument during that campaign. The press had come around having abandoned the PN in the years leading up to 2013. But the real campaigning was not happening in public discourse, not the campaigning that changed anyone’s vote. The campaigning was happening behind closed doors as Labour promised (and delivered) on micro-favours for families switching sides towards Labour.

But there is one thing we should take home from Mark Camilleri’s remarks. There are other reasons to choose a politician or a political party when you vote than the ones you would expect or the ones that may have been your reasons in the past. You don’t have to love them. You don’t even have to like them. You don’t have to feel you’re in any way committed to defend their decisions or even not to protest against them strongly. You don’t have to agree with everything they stand for. You don’t have to agree with most of what they stand for.

It would be nice if they were lovable, but being lovable is not a job requirement for politicians. You’re not marrying them. You’re voting them in to run your country for a few years while you wait and hope someone better shows up in the meantime.

You just need to work out that voting for the politicians you choose from the options available to you is the best use you could possibly make of the very limited power you have: your right to vote.

Mark Camilleri will spontaneously burst into flames in a church square before he would call himself a “nazzjonalist”. He’s nothing of the sort. But he’s declaring his intention to vote PN and encourages anyone who might listen to his views on the matter to do the same for concerns that are entirely impersonal. He does not expect the country to become a paradise when and if the PN are elected. But he calculates the country gets a slim chance it doesn’t turn to hell.

It would be nice if you could ask for me. But there it is. Anything is better than hell.