Education and Employment Minister Louis Galea has had a bitter end to his parliamentary career. 2008 has turned out to be a rude awakening for the veteran minister: last elected in 2003 on two districts, Galea has now been refused on both of them. He garnered just 1,810 first preference votes on the sixth district (Qormi, Luqa and Siggiewi); and 1,791 votes on the fifth district (Birzebbuga, Qrendi, Kirkop, Safi, Zurrieq and Mqabba). Altogether, his vote count went down by a fatal 23%. The long-serving education minister and architect of the Nationalist’s education reforms, is out.
Louis Galea will not even get one of the residual four seats the Nationalists take as part of the Constitutional guarantee for a one-seat majority: those seats will go to Jean-Pierre Farrugia, Edwin Vassallo, Frans Agius, and Francis Zammit Dimech, who are the candidates with the highest number of votes at the final count.
Instead, all he gets is a pat on the back, thanks for everything and off you go.
Lawrence Gonzi’s Cabinet reshuffle was now an electoral pledge but his old Cabinet had remained intact because he did not want to upset the ongoing progress of his economic turnaround. Indeed, Gonzi couldn’t find anything wrong with his Cabinet. He just knew he had to respond to the public’s tiredness at his sometimes embarrassing Cabinet, which Labour made the focus of its negative campaign.
Gonzi responded with his solipsistic, over-personalised and presidential GonziPN campaign with wife Kate on tow. He met social partners with some new faces by his side – there was Gozo’s Chris Said, and Lija mayor Ian Castaldi Paris, or Georg Sapiano, but never an ‘old’ face. They only appeared on official government work or Gonzi’s evening “dialogues” with TV personalities.
And despite having been already sidelined by Lawrence Gonzi’s very promise to change his old Cabinet, Galea was ironically the man who held Gonzi’s back when he really needed it in this election.
First, he gave Gonzi new firepower when he fished out the reception class proposal from Labour’s cumbersome Pjan Ghal Bidu Gdid, and launched an offensive right in the middle of the election, accusing Labour of upsetting the education system. The “reception means repeater” strategy became a lynchpin of the PN’s attack on Labour’s proposals. The veteran Galea, a man known for his invaluable political acumen in the Nationalist Cabinet – and also a former contestant for the PN leadership – had smelt the kind of worrisome ‘Labour logic’ that would send parents in a tizzy. For most of the campaign, all the election was about was Labour’s reception class.
And then, even as Gonzi exhorted voters to choose new candidates, Louis Galea was there again in Zurrieq at a PN dialogue to tell everyone the beloved prime minister had never dared introduce fees for public healthcare. On the other hand, Galea reassured the Nationalists, it was his very own Cabinet subcommittee which discussed a civil servant’s report proposing the fees, and that he had stopped it from reaching Cabinet level.
And yet, Galea became the victim of Gonzi’s promise to introduce new blood. Like him were Communications and Competitiveness Minister Censu Galea and Foreign Minister Michael Frendo, the latter absent even from Labour’s negative campaign. Likewise, Parliamentary Secretaries Tony Abela, Helen D’Amato, Edwin Vassallo and Francis Agius all failed to secure their parliamentary seat.
This was after all, only the natural result of Gonzi’s direct campaign at endorsing young and new candidates who, at the end of the day, had mixed fortunes. Pippo Psaila, the St Edward’s pin-up alumnus, bombed with just 383 votes in the tenth district; Ian Castaldi Paris managed just a meagre 141 votes from his home district; the haughty Georg Sapiano lapped up just 58 votes on the ninth (but got 400 second preferences from Gonzi voters); Siggiewi mayor Robert Musumeci not making it despite 875 first preference votes.
The young newcomer was lawyer Franco Debono, who pipped Louis Galea on the fifth district; and Chris Said, the popular Nadur mayor whose ascendancy had long been coming. The mystery of the election was the double victory of shamed Nationalist candidate Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, elected on both seventh and eleventh districts by the hardened grassroots. Tonio Fenech, the only fresh face of the Cabinet, was returned on two districts, his fortunes buoyed by working by Gonzi’s side in the euro campaign. Jesmond Mugliett was returned to parliament – after all, Gonzi never accepted his resignation and stood up for him till the end. And John Dalli, a former minister who spent the last years as a guerrilla MP? Frontrunner on his traditional sixth district and an exceptional 1,711 votes on the tenth district – Gonzi’s last-minute endorsement in December patched up the rift and salvaged Dalli’s constituency.
So people did respond to calls to vote for new faces and choose a new Cabinet themselves. GonziPN had worked to hide away his veterans, and benefit new faces. Just look at the tenth district, where former Sliema mayor Robert Arrigo gets elected on both the ninth and tenth districts, while Francis Zammit Dimech and Michael Frendo flounder. You can say all you like about Zammit Dimech – but there’s no way that Arrigo could match up to a veteran.
Perhaps Louis Galea’s time was up – the man’s record as minister is debatable for the scandal of tenders and direct orders that were issued from his Auxiliary Workers Training Scheme (AWTS) and the Foundation for Tomorrow’s Schools. But his reforms in education were the revolution of the 1990s. And in 1977 he was instrumental in building up Eddie Fenech Adami’s party during very difficult times.
And likewise, you can say all you like about the moisturised looks and gelled hair of Gonzi’s young Turks – but a Nationalist Cabinet without Louis Galea, is politically, a weaker one.

mvella@mediatoday.com.mt