Harry Vassallo | Wednesday, 14 January 2009

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Just as President Elect Barack Obama takes office in the White House at the end of an arduous election process occupying the global media for more than a year, Dr George Abela seemed to pop out of nowhere to become the President of choice for both the PN and the PL with the explicit blessing of AD and AN. He just slipped smoothly into place.
I wonder how he feels. Quite apart from the political adjustments he will have to make on taking on this new role, it also entails a major shift in his private life. It will affect his family, his wider family. It ends his professional activity. It exposes him to challenges and dangers he has never had to face.
Never having contested any general or local election, he has never before held public political office. He has never had to take unpopular decisions on matters of public policy and never taken the rap for them. He has never had the opportunity to make any great mistake. He comes to the Presidency untarnished, or almost, and certainly without the burden of years of leading the fray in confrontational politics.

Pleasant surprise
Certainly the widespread reaction of pleasant surprise must be very encouraging. He slips into the role possessing a level of popular approval few, if any, of his predecessors have enjoyed. Many of them surprised their critics by putting aside their partisan baggage altogether; Dr Abela has had it taken from him even as he was nominated.
His party, the PL, was utterly flummoxed by the choice: there was no possibility of rejection. It would have labelled them insufferable ingrates had they shown even the slightest misgiving or hesitation. Dr Abela is one of their own. They could not refuse him.
The PL has no choice but to allow the PN, GonziPN, indeed Lawrence Gonzi himself a moment of greatness, apparent magnanimity. The PL must dance to the PN tune. In the appointment to the Presidency, the PN have chosen to seem generous thus wiping away the memory of the less than generous practice in appointments to other posts, a masterstroke indeed. The largely ceremonial office has been conceded while the key posts have been kept under firm control.
The heartburn over the appointment of Louis Galea, the acrimony about yet another partisan President and the raking up of every unpleasantness that could be found has all been avoided. The cleverness in choosing George Abela, itself avoids all the aftermath of choosing one PN figure over another, doubly clever.

Old Labour
There remains one major issue in which the PN may not have been as clever as so many of us think. George Abela, respectable colleague and likeable man as he may be, is still old enough to be associated with Old Labour, the bad old days of the 1980s MLP governments on which the present PN government and party fanatics set such score. He is no Joseph Muscat, the new guy on the block, so young that he cannot be smeared with any part of that ancient past.
George Abela was there at the time, through it all he never struck his colours, never faltered in his loyalty to the MLP. How is the PN going to continue its campaign to associate Joseph Muscat with a past so distant he could not know when it appoints to the Presidency a person who was at least a minor actor in that period of political pathology?

Teflon George
To be fair to George Abela it must be said that even at the worst of times he was himself, a proper Teflon guy, impossible to hate, an argument and a smile always available, never passionate, never excessive in anything. He sailed through it all as though it did not concern him. It’s in the way he walks. It’s in the way he talks. It’s in the way he always covers his backside. It all comes naturally to him. Let’s face it, this is a major talent he brings to the Presidency.
Will he sit on his throne and smile serenely while the PN renew the violent past in perpetuity for electoral purposes? That is a very real option, in character and nobody could pull it off better that George Abela. On the other hand, George Abela has been given a historic opportunity to bring that grim chapter to a final close.
Exalted above the fray, he can afford to recall it and denounce it. Unlike Joseph Muscat who must rest on his youth, Abela can use his seniority to face the unpleasantness and to invite us all to face it and reject it, to exorcise that ghost once and for all.
On the face of it this would serve Labour best by granting it absolution for the sins of its fathers and grandfathers. In fact it serves us all as citizens: if this distant past is what prevents the PL from being a viable alternative 21 years after the most recent of those events, it also prevents the PN from feeling the closeness of the competition. Any complacency or arrogant smugness on the PN side could be blown away if this ancient big stink is eliminated. After that, we could all hope for a better service.

Dr Vassallo is Consulting Editor with Mediatoday Ltd

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