Tonight in parliament - showtime for Franco Debono?

Is this the beginning of the end?

Parliament is reconvened this afternoon under the ominous cloud of Franco Debono's threat to file a no-confidence motion against Lawrence Gonzi's Health Minister Joe Cassar, and the prospect that he might not support Budget 2013 in a move that would eventually spell the end of the PN government.

This is a serious moment for the prime minister. Today evening, the Nationalist backbench will lack its one-seat majority after Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando broke off from the party and became an independent MP, while Franco Debono - now officially declaring he will not support the government - has turned himself into a wild card.

His threat not to support Gonzi is the result of almost 12 months during which the Ghaxaq MP played a long-drawn-out game which has left the Nationalist administration on tenterhooks.

In November 2011, he almost cost Transport Minister Austin Gatt his job until he finally abstained on a no-confidence motion moved by Labour. At that point, with the PN bending over backwards not to anger the MP, the party announced that Gatt's right-hand man Manuel Delia was not an official party candidate (his battleground is Debono's fifth district).

Soon after, Debono's vocal criticism of the Justice and Home Affairs Minister turned into a tug-of-war with the prime minister, ostensibly over his demand to have the ministry portfolio split. The unkwown proviso - it would later turn out - was that Debono may have expected to be made justice minister.

Then, all hell broke loose when Gonzi announced on 6 January he was promoting his parliamentary secretaries to ministers, with Chris Said now justice minister. An irked Debono announced he would not support the government.

Labour pounced on the prospect of the MP withdrawing his support, but a no-confidence motion in the government did not pass. Matters came to a head within the next six months: first Gonzi declared he would put his leadership to the test of the Nationalist councillors, who reconfirmed him as party leader; then came two no-confidence motions which had the deleterious effect of seeing Carm Mifsud Bonnici resign as justice minister (after Franco Debono voted with the Opposition) and EU ambassador Richard Cachia Caruana following suit (after Pullicino Orlando voted for the motion).

Lawrence Gonzi knows his government is hamstrung and that reaching out to Franco Debono, an inconsolable and ambitious MP who fell out with the traditional follow-the-leader style expected in Maltese politics, was impossible. The PN took the route to invite the MP to bring the government down. Nobody in his right mind would think of bringing down a Nationalist government out of principle, so in this Wild West duel, Franco will have to pull the trigger first. The PN banned the MP from recontesting on the party ticket, but Debono seemed intent on holding on - first by appealing the decision, and after that, launching his own personal blog.

Debono's online soapbox has so far been the most revealing of the way the MP sees himself in this whole political misadventure which, albeit carrying a chunky and painful storyline, is the indisputable enduring image to the Gonzi II government: the logical extreme of the GonziPN strategy soured by some real, not just perceived, bad leadership decisions.

In his blog, Debono writes with a candour shorn of any political correctness or style - the urgency of his blog posts, often replete with spelling mistakes or a disregard for punctuation -  attest to the vigour and indignance of his statements. He publicly takes to task Lawrence Gonzi with some jagged, if unstylish, monikers.

But when he dubs him Lawrence 'DCG' Gonzi - the obvious reference to Daphne Caruana Galizia - Debono perhaps illustrates the logical conclusion to the Nationalists's own unofficial campaign of using poison-pen columnists and other media acolytes to attack their opponents through ridicule and social ostracisation. Because of his inability to stop even his party's unofficial media from attacking his own democratically elected MPs, Gonzi is percieved as having blessed such attacks.

Additonally, Debono's constant blog posts - frequent, pointed, containing numerous quips against ministers and PN officials and candidates - make him the focus of all the PN's troubles. Lawrence Gonzi tries to ignore the Debono factor in public, by pointing to the successes his government managed to achieve, but it is hard to ignore that the prime minister is anxiously waiting for Debono to take the fateful step that will push this government towards the general elections - perhaps sooner than later.

While the media (and the public) awaits with bated breath the hour of Debono, there is also the chance that no such surprise moves will take place, allowing the government to continue with its ongoing electoral campaign while Debono shoots from the sidelines.

The chances that he becomes some government heckler will greatly reduce the impact he hopes to achieve, especially after declaring that so many ministers should now take responsibility for the shortcomings in their ministries; or that he cannot support a government that has Austin Gatt as minister.

As this newspaper has stated time and again, if the government does not fall this time around - and the setting might well be Budget 2013 - the crisis may become normalised in the popular psyche. Debono becomes a national joke.

We could sit back and enjoy the show, but there is nothing frivolous about Gonzi's government hanging by the skin of its teeth. The Independence celebrations and the Labour congress revealed two parties who have mapped out electoral strategies that deal little with principles or policies, and more with raw electoral strategies designed to cut losses and maximise gains.

Now the electoral campaign has unofficially started, with a possible six months of feuding left to go. So far, Muscat's declaration that he doesn't want the minimum wage to rise as yet (and it hasn't risen since 1987 except for the annual cost of living adjustment) has resulted in a first round of accusations and rebuttals: the Nationalists accuse him of toying around with a wage freeze à la 1983; Muscat replies with a libel suit against Gonzi. The backdrop to this political feud is a drop in domestic consumption and purchasing power, but this is of no importance compared to the motions of political theatre both government and Opposition have to go through before the election is called.

Franco Debono, who boasts great timing, holds the key perhaps. All we can do is wait.