Case closed… regrettably

Gee, what a surprise. Two parliamentary votes of confidence in as many weeks, and… wonder of wonders. The outcome was exactly the same for each. A victory for the party in government – which now has a double excuse to simply carry on disregarding the Panamagate outcry indefinitely – and a defeat for the MPs in Opposition. And by exactly the same margin, too: 36-31… by a huge coincidence, the same seat difference that separates government from opposition anyway.

If this were the outcome of a local Premier league encounter, I would suspect that the entire match had been rigged. (And, in that context, I would almost certainly be right, too.) Same score in two games? Both scores favourable to one side in exactly the same way? Way too much of a coincidence, I would think.

But in this particular game, the rules are not as haphazard as football. With only very few exceptions – Mintoff in 1998, Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando in 2011, etc – the outcome of any given parliamentary vote is almost always a mathematical certainty. Realistically speaking, there cannot possibly have been a single soul in the entire country who genuinely expected a different result in either vote.

I would assume that also includes Opposition leader Simon Busuttil and MP Marlene Farrugia: the respective auteurs of this latest twist in the Konrad Mizzi saga. Both know only too well how Parliament works here… having sat in it themselves for quite some time… so both would (or should) have been fully aware of the implications of failure in this instance. 

Yet they forged on all the same, all the way to certain defeat: oblivious even to dissenting voices emanating from within the PN itself, which rightly questioned the wisdom of such a patently flawed strategy. If, under the circumstances, we can talk about two Opposition ‘parties’ here (the Nationalist Party, and the as yet unofficial ‘party of Marlene’)… then we must also conclude that both have just conspired, with spectacular success, to effectively close the case against Konrad Mizzi once and for all.

For let’s be blunt about at least one thing. It is useless to go on stamping one’s feet and shouting oneself hoarse in pursuit of Konrad Mizzi’s resignation – still less the resignation of the entire government, as Busuttil has been demanding for months now – when Parliament has just given Mizzi an unambiguous green light to stay on as a member of Cabinet: not once, but twice. 

To do so would be to publicly reject the verdict delivered by what is supposed to be the highest institution in the land. That is not an impression any politician can afford to impart… still less, the Opposition leader who so unwisely insisted on those doomed votes being taken from the start.

The bottom line, then, is that we are now lumped with Mizzi for the rest of this government’s term… whether we like it or not, and thanks in no uncertain terms to the Opposition benches. And this can only raise multiple questions about a political party system that has now not only clearly failed… but is actually falling apart at the seams.

Joseph Muscat now has multiple reasons to limit his response to Panamagate to the ridiculous game of musical chairs we all witnessed last week. At a stretch, he could even have chosen to interpret the twin victories in parliament as a wholesale endorsement of his government’s programme. On paper, he would be right to reason this way: after all, it was the Opposition’s choice to extend the debate to the government’s performance as a whole, rather than limiting it to Panamagate itself. 

Effectively, then, Busuttil shifted the theatre of political warfare from a terrain where his own troops were strong, onto one which suited Muscat’s military strategy better. And I am sorry to have to spell it out, but this is the moment when level-headed people – especially Nationalists – should start seriously questioning whether the PN picked the right candidate to succeed Lawrence Gonzi in 2013.

It is an important question to ask right now, too. Given Muscat’s woefully unsatisfactory response in both debates, now is the time when what is needed more than ever is a strategically effective Opposition.

And there were plenty of historical pointers as to how an opposition can indeed act effectively under similar circumstances. Consider, for a moment, how the previous Opposition had behaved when the shoe was on the other foot. 

For three whole years, Joseph Muscat resisted the temptation to table a vote of confidence in the ailing Gonzi administration… even though, by that time, it was hanging onto power by a single thread named ‘Franco Debono’. (Note: the 2011 vote on Austin Gatt was turned into a confidence vote in government by Gonzi himself, specifically to avoid losing.)

Why? Well, I would imagine it’s because Muscat knew perfectly well that he might have won a vote against Gatt (Mr Unpopular, at the time... he stood no chance at all of winning a vote against the government as a whole. Franco Debono may have been a maverick… but he was also fully aware that by bringing his own government down, he would be pressing the ‘self-destruct’ button on his own career. 

So the Labour opposition tabled a vote of confidence against Richard Cachia Caruana instead… this time, snug in the knowledge that it would easily win, because it had made damn sure to secure the collaboration of Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando beforehand.

Meanwhile, if you’re not happy with my example – because it paints Muscat as a better Opposition leader than Busuttil – well, how about Eddie Fenech Adami? 

I clearly remember the parliamentary debate leading to the downfall of Alfred Sant’s administration in the long, hot summer of ’98. Fenech Adami took full advantage of the situation: fêting and toasting his erstwhile archenemy Dom Mintoff; inviting him onto Nationalist media; surrendering his own Parliamentary debate time so that Mintoff could talk for longer… and longer… and longer… (In fact, I seem to remember one speech that lasted three whole days…)

But did Fenech Adami ever table a vote of confidence in Sant’s administration? No. He was far too clever for that. He knew perfectly well that, whatever feelings Mintoff may have harboured for Sant at the time… he would never, ever, EVER vote against a Labour government at the instigation of the Nationalists.

So instead, Fenech Adami bided his time (not for very long, as it turned out) in the hope that Sant would make the mistake of calling for Parliament’s confidence himself. That way, Mintoff could freely bring himself to scuttle his own government… without being seen to have taken his orders directly from Eddie Fenech Adami.

Now let’s see how all this compares with last week’s vote of confidence in Muscat’s government.

Did Busuttil secure the support of dissenting backbenchers before tabling the motion… as Muscat had done with Pullicino Orlando. Evidently not. Bizarrely, he somehow expected today’s government MPs to do what not even Mintoff or Franco Debono would willingly do, and collectively vote to abruptly terminate their own careers. 

Honestly, even a small child could have told him that this would never, ever happen in practice… and that, by inevitably losing both votes, Busuttil and Farrugia would also have unwittingly legitimised the Muscat administration in spite of its failings. 

And this forces us to confront an ugly irony. If the political system wasn’t as blatantly rotten as we all know it to be… at least Farrugia’s vote might have been won. It was painfully obvious that several Labour MPs were deeply uncomfortable defending Mizzi. Theoretically it was possible (though exceedingly unlikely) to pull off a repeat of the Cachia Caruana experience.

This because even diehard Labour supporters can see that something is amiss here. In most other European democracies, Konrad Mizzi would have been summarily fired by his prime minister… long before any ‘vote of confidence’ could be given the chance to annul the effects of his actions. In Malta, by way of contrast, these two failed Opposition initiatives have reconfirmed what can only be described as a dangerously immature political establishment, on two fronts.

On the one hand, we have a government that resists doing the honourable thing when caught with its pants down… snug in the knowledge that it can always rely on Malta’s primitive culture of partisan pique (coupled with its own unassailable Parliamentary majority) to withstand any challenge.

And on the other? An Opposition which literally hands Muscat, on a silver platter, all the official excuses he needs to justify his cabinet reshuffle… and even to put a parliamentary lid on the Konrad Mizzi affair once and for all. And to make matters infinitely worse, it is also an Opposition which foolishly believes that raising the political tempo in this country is somehow doing itself a favour… when there is an abundance of evidence to the contrary.

The results of Busuttil’s soapbox populism and relentless partisan tirades were proudly put on display at the May Day rally in Valletta last week. You all saw the T-shirts: ‘Laburist sal-mewt’... ‘Joseph Muscat forever’…. you know, just the sort of confidence boost a beleaguered prime minister needs, at a time when he is facing inner dissent within his own party.

The only discernible effect of all this endless partisan nonsense spouted by the Opposition all this time is to take a Labour support-base that had been genuinely dismayed by Mizzi’s indiscretion – and which may, in pockets, have truly questioned its own continued support for that party – and instantly undo all the doubt and disappointment in one fell swoop. Sensing that their ‘team’ was under threat, the Labour faithful responded to the ancestral summons of party allegiance as they have always done in the past… by closing ranks about their beloved leader, and bursting into a chorus of ‘Ma Taghmlu Xejn’.

In a sense, I feel sorry for the people who attended Saturday’s protest (I’m writing this on Friday) on the basis of what it actually is: a statement that Muscat’s actions do not go far enough. They’re the ones who genuinely want to see improvement in the state of governance in Malta; and improvement is precisely the one thing they will never get, from a two-party system that offers nothing but a choice of mediocrity all round.