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Karl Schembri analyses the good, the bad and the ugly of the Prime Minister’s first 100 days in office and says it was no honeymoon at all
Grey clouds amassed outside the Palace on 23 March, the day Lawrence Gonzi was sworn in as Prime Minister, and 100 days since then, there seems still to be no silver lining in the political clouds hanging over his head.
The former president of Azzjoni Kattolika finds himself in one of the worst political scenarios to befall a Prime Minister since Alfred Sant’s aborted government in 1998. This time, however, Gonzi is facing a crises period after a mere 100 days in power.
A picture of Gonzi more often than not hesitant and procrastinating is emerging, and the impression is confirmed with his manner of dealing with now former foreign minister John Dalli who was left dangling unnecessarily for weeks before the Minister made his move.
While Gonzi must take the credit for allowing several important decisions to be taken in his short reign, including certain reforms to government agencies and the replacement of top men who were evidently not performing up to scratch, the Prime Minister continues to give signs that he has not totally come to grips with governing.
In normal circumstances the first hundred days would be a Prime Minister’s honeymoon period, but for Fenech Adami’s anointed successor it is proving to be a nightmare with the PN managing its worst election result since 1953.
Truth be told, Gonzi found himself at the helm of his party and of the country just a few weeks before EU membership, when pessimism in Malta was at its highest.
Barely a year since last year’s general election – which the PN won almost solely on the EU membership issue – Malta was getting its first bitter taste of realism, with the smoke of the referendum propaganda disappearing only to expose the harsh truths that were neglected by the PN for decades.
The public has been well aware of much that has been wrong with the PN administration of the past decades including the spending sprees of ministries, government agencies, mushrooming authorities, all at a time when ordinary people were being told there was no such thing as a free meal.
Uncertainty
We all face the disturbing realisation that thousands of jobs were on the line, despite promises that EU membership would increase employment.
We have long been aware of the uncertainty surrounding pensions, health care; indeed the welfare state as a whole with the government doing nothing to give a clear indication of its policies.
Hard to swallow for most has been the “friends of friends” network which any party in power for more than a decade is inevitably doomed to construct and nurture, as was the case with the Italian Democrazia Cristiana, and Mintoff’s old Labour.
We all now face the sudden realisation that government had no programme beyond EU membership. We realise the need for a continual change of governments in a normal democratic process where the party(s) in opposition present themselves as a real alternative to the government in office.
On the eve of EU membership, different sectors of society were realising that the country was not prepared for what was expected of it. The Nationalist party in government had to face the stark reality of its responsibilities.
And yet, the past year was one which Gonzi somehow insisted on calling “exceptional.”
Because of EU membership, new laws had to be rushed through Parliament, new bureaucratic procedures were sprouting out of everywhere.
The engineered landfill and promised waste separation were nowhere to be seen, the rushed Mnajdra landfills ‘decision’ alienated all sensible citizens from the government, the ordinary tax-paying workers who were expecting a decent pension on retirement.
Disintegrating bloc
We were suddenly being told that our pensions, (albeit pitiful when compared to the privileged pension of ministers) might never materialise. The Mater Dei hospital (remember we were told it was ‘a gift to the Maltese’? – possibly the only gift in human history to be paid by those who receive it) was found to be unsustainable to construct, let alone to operate. The national bloc representing all of civil society that had rallied behind Fenech Adami to secure a ‘Yes’ vote disintegrated in less than a year, with 44,000 PN voters deciding not to vote for the Party they endorsed at EU election time.
Add to that the lost mega trial by jury of Meinrad Calleja – Fenech Adami’s worst misjudgement in his political career after that of wanting to become President – and you have the perfect ingredients for an early election. If it was not for the unbearably weak opposition of Alfred Sant’s Labour one could almost be arguing for a change in government, even at this early stage.
To be fair to Gonzi, he has shown promise in a variety of areas and with some decisions. In the run up to the election for PN Party leader Gonzi was portrayed by his detractors as ‘indecisive’ while his main challenger made a point of indicating his reputation as being ‘decisive.’
The general opinion of what has happened since Gonzi took over, however, has more the shape of a partial change.
New way
While Gonzi promised a new way of doing politics, it is on that count where he has failed most miserably, despite early promise. The PN remains a Party that is partisan and worse than that there has been no new spring – no fresh modern way of conducting politics with novel ideas to solve old problems.
There has been no real changing of the guard at ministerial level, although it must be added, that Gonzi is forced to work with what he had.
Our chain-smoking Prime Minister had a very decent CV, no skeletons in the closet; full marks as a good boy with a genuine interest in the disabled and social NGOs. His pedigree was good as nephew of the late conservative, controversial Archbishop Mikiel Gonzi; he was seen as a decisive of a mild-mannered Speaker of the House; an express ladder climber inside the PN with a contagious smile (although some may see it as patronising). The problem is that he has lacked leadership qualities.
Fenech Adami too did not have them when he took the helm of the PN, one might say. Indeed, but circumstances forced him to take the initiative.
Gonzi’s predecessor faced his home assaulted and wrecked by criminal Labour thugs, a couple of political murders and a national wave of disgruntlement, verging on the revolutionary, against a corrupt police state. In some ways blessings in disguise for any budding leader.
Fortunately for the country, unfortunately for him, Gonzi doesn’t have similar happenings in his script. To begin with, he’s in power, he cannot campaign in resistance to anything (resistance is always easier), unlike Fenech Adami’s crusade against the Mintoff government’s mockery of civil liberties.
Not only is he in power, but his Party has been in power far too long and is showing clear signs of decadence all over its façade.
With the EU membership secured once and for all, even Fenech Adami, the PN’s answer to Tito, would have sooner or later found himself in the quicksand of public discontent.
But if he was out of touch with the people in his last months, Fenech Adami managed to hold a grip on his party until his last minute in office, actually until afterwards, to the point of getting Gonzi to appoint him President. That is evidently not the case with Gonzi.
Leadership fallout
On the contrary, it now transpires that the leadership fallout with John Dalli has conditioned Gonzi from day one as Prime Minister. With Dalli stubbornly refusing to remain at the finance ministry, Gonzi faced his first crisis only a couple of hours after his swearing in on 23 March. That evening, former economic services minister Josef Bonnici rightly refused to become parliamentary secretary for finance.
It would have been a humiliating demotion for the economics professor. Gonzi’s messy ‘solution’ at the eleventh hour was to merge his own office with finance, with newcomer Tonio Fenech as parliamentary secretary.
Taking finance in his charge was, at best, unwise. Faced as he is with an imminent economic breakdown, soaring unemployment and a debilitating deficit, the minister in charge of finance should definitely be a full-timer.
Instead, far from scrutinising the treasury’s balance sheet, in the first 100 days we saw our Prime Minister yet again in election mode, going on walk-abouts with EP candidates and attending every party activity religiously, to the point that it’s impossible to distinguish between Party and government.
Gonzi is wrong when he says the people voted in protest against the government because of “tough measures” it had taken of late.
On the whole - excluding Air Malta’s restructuring plans they weren’t tough - and even in the case of our national carrier it is too early in the day to see whether the plans will turn the airline’s staggering losses into profits. Redeploying 900 drydocks workers with the government doesn’t solve anything. Divesting PBS of most of its resources may make the station more efficient, but will not give us the national TV station we deserve.
So far, welfare reform and the legendary social pact remain only in the air and should decisions not be taken as the months turn into years, they will return to haunt, both us and Gonzi and his entourage.
Flak from the Commission
In his panic-driven attempts to curb public expenditure, the Prime Minister has resorted to abrupt budget cuts here and there, targeting mostly capital projects, but these are inconsistently followed up with unacceptable spending sprees elsewhere, adding fuel to the fire of public pessimism. One need only mention the Lm6.5 million embassy in Brussels.
As self-appointed finance minister, Gonzi got the flak from the European Commission for the country’s burgeoning deficit. At over 9 percent (Gonzi insists it is less) the Commission is clearly worried that Malta’s deficit is out of control.
With no new incentives to collect monies and no effective trimming in the bloated government civil service, Gonzi has to seriously tackle the welfare system and put an end to tax evasion.
Increasing taxes will only lead to more discontent and discomfort from a restless and impatient middle class, but worse than that it will also serve to further stagnate a country in dire need of entrepreneurship, investment and stimulus. At the same time, Gonzi is in no position to promise that he will not be increasing taxes.
Probably the best thing Gonzi did with his new Cabinet was appointing Dolores Cristina Minister for Social Policy – she is definitely the most decent, pragmatic and sensible minister in Gonzi’s Cabinet – but he screwed it all up by insisting insensitively on the fact that he didn’t choose her “just because she’s a woman” (he would repeat the same blunder with every female appointment he made ever since).
Clearly having one good minister is not enough for a government to deliver, and that is an understatement.
True, he removed Ninu Zammit’s responsibility for landfills and eventually made sure he reversed the idiotic Mnajdra landfills plan, but that served more to illustrate the burdens Gonzi had inherited from Fenech Adami, and to show how futile the whole landfills saga was right from the very start. The Environmental Impact Assessment for the landfills that will never materialise in Qrendi cost the government some Lm40,000. Only the foreign consultants are smiling.
The lame Cabinet reshuffle (“he’s just laying dectures on the Titanic,” Nazi candidate Norman Lowell beautifully described it) was immediately followed by a decision which only served to sow the seeds of dissent within the very core of the varied Nationalist camp, and to mark Gonzi’s dismal failure to reach his own benchmark “of a new way of doing politics”: Fenech Adami’s appointment as President.
Alfred Sant called it “a vulgar appointment,” hitting the nail on the head, coming as it was in the wake of Gonzi’s promise to work for national reconciliation. It hurt the traditionally pale blue voters and attracted the condemnation of staunch Nationalist opinionists many of whom find the PN appealing for its smartness, rather than its ideology. Gonzi lacked the political acumen to realise this.
Advisors
One gets the impression Secretary General Joe Saliba has become Gonzi’s Richard Cachia Caruana. If that’s the case, it is really showing. What can you say about a Prime Minister’s advisor who lets him say, after a a long, scathing attack on Alternattiva Demokratika, that were he in Alternattiva’s shoes he would do the same as they had done and field a candidate for the EP elections?
What can you say about the advisors of a Prime Minister who ends up adlibbing whenever he is challenged by the media? What can you say about the advisors of a Prime Minister who fail so miserably in their negative campaign against the Green party, at the expense of losing a seat in the European Parliament to Labour in a veritable protest vote?
Dalli affair
Even worse, Gonzi’s advisors let him take five whole weeks to decide whether to give the sack to disgraced Foreign Minister, John Dalli, in the wake of serious allegations about his family’s contract with an Iranian shipping company and about air tickets bought by his ministry from a previously family-owned tourist agency. Five long whole weeks in which he neither defended nor kicked out his minister. So much for his self-proclaimed decisiveness.
Unbelievably, the Secretary General of the PN, Joe Saliba, reiterates that he has nothing to say, and so does Gonzi, about Dalli’s allusion to party manoeuvres in a bid to frame him.
“I don’t exclude anything,” Dalli said on PBS when asked whether he excluded the possibility that this was orchestrated by his own party. “But I won’t be turned into a scapegoat again, as had happened in 1996.”
How can a Prime Minister remain silent when his foreign minister makes such statements?
His deputy, Tonio Borg, isn’t much of a support either. With all the nonsense he said about nukes and ecotaxes during the EP election campaign, he would have been an embarrassing nuisance for any sensible leader, but Gonzi remained unperturbed.
The main problem with Borg is that apart from being astoundingly inept at handling the media, he also has Gonzi’s conservative political outlook, alienating the liberal, progressive and more secular factions of the party.
That is why John Dalli’s downfall is not only devastating for himself, but also for the Party.
Gonzi must have been afraid of seeming too eager for the first opportunity to get rid of his internal opponent, with inevitable ensuing repercussions within l-Istamperija, and he must have also been concerned by the unpredictable effects such a decision would have before the EP election. In any case, the Dalli affair was a resignation matter, on ethical grounds.
In the absence of a resignation, Gonzi just tried to buy time, possibly awaiting further evidence to appear, which it did, but he failed to respond. Even if it was all orchestrated by the Party machinery itself, as Dalli suggested, it was handled so badly that its effects are bound to leave an indelible scar on the PN.
Last September, when he was still social policy minister and the leadership election was still far away, I had interviewed Gonzi and asked him whether his conflicting statements to those of Dalli, then Finance Minister, about social welfare and pensions, were the first sparks in the imminent party leadership battle.
“I can guarantee that all the ministers’ main goal, John Dalli and me included, is to retire from politics seeing our country in a better state than when we were elected,” he told me.
One hundred days since he became Prime Minister, nine months since he said those words, Dalli is out, but it is not at all clear whether or not the country is in a better state.
karl@newswoksltd.com
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