Despite his attempts to minimise the significance of Monday’s vote in Parliament, Dr Lawrence Gonzi shall sooner or later have to admit that he now faces a very serious uphill struggle until the next election in 2013.
The Labour Party has naturally pounced on the opportunity to trumpet the government’s “instability” to the four winds – as well it might, considering that an analogous (though not identical) situation led to its own government’s downfall just over 10 years ago.
But while the PN rightly points out that the issue at stake was not crucial to the government’s survival, it remains a fact that the Prime Minister can no longer rely on the loyalty of his unruly backbenchers... one of whom has now taken that all-important step beyond the threshold of political obedience.
Admittedly, a future ‘spontaneous combustion’ of the kind last seen in 1998 remains improbable, given the PN’s traditional penchant for reining in its mavericks when push comes to shove. Instead, Gonzi faces the uncomfortable prospect of presiding over a hamstrung government for three critical years: unable to pass any meaningful legislation without first having to horse-trade with his own MPs.
This is not the sort of Nationalist government we have been used to in the past, and among the questions currently asked by incredulous Nationalist voters are the following: Would Eddie Fenech Adami have consented to visit a rebel backbencher in his own home, as Gonzi did last Wednesday? If so, would he have gone accompanied by his wife? And more to the point: would Fenech Adami even have allowed himself to be arm-wrestled to this point in the first place?
And yet, it would be fallacious reasoning to assume that the PN’s current woes begin and end with Franco Debono himself – a young and visibly inexperienced MP, who may in any case have just signed his own death warrant with his antics last Monday. No, the roots of Gonzi’s malaise clearly lie elsewhere: in fact, they can be traced directly to Gonzi’s strategy to gamble on his own persona before the March 2008 election, when his party clinched the narrowest of victories from the jaws of defeat.
At that point, Gonzi was clearly buoyed by the results of numerous surveys, including our own, in which he consistently emerged as Malta’s most trusted political leader over Labour’s Dr Alfred Sant. As a result, the traditional PN billboards metamorphosed overnight into ‘GonziPN’ billboards: a clear message of faith in the Admiral of the Fleet, but which conversely also spelt out a glaring lack of trust in any of his own commodores and captains.
With hindsight, it is remarkable that so few had foreseen the inevitable consequences of this rash electoral gimmick. Ironically, Debono’s own election to parliament from two districts – at the expense of faithful party stalwarts such as Louis Galea and Helen D’Amato – can be attributed directly to Gonzi’s conscious decision to sideline his own Cabinet ministers before the election, effectively limiting their ability to conduct a personal campaign.
From this perspective, there is an inescapable irony in Monday’s fracas: of all people it had to be Galea himself, now Speaker of the House, to rescue the Prime Minister from serious embarrassment.
Even after the election, Gonzi compounded his own problems by consistently mishandling situations, unnecessarily antagonising his own foot-soldiers in the process. First, he alienated former ministers by informing them of their demotion only by means of an SMS. Later, he allowed replacement ministers to publicly criticise their predecessors’ performance... much to the latters’ understandable dismay and resentment.
More recently still, the Prime Minister was publicly contradicted by outgoing Commissioner Joe Borg, who insists he was led to believe that he would be reappointed to the post... when all along, Gonzi was not even considering him as an option. Since then, other former PN officials such as Joe Psaila Savona and Michael Bonnici have also chimed in with their complaints... in a somewhat undignified manner, it must be said.
What all these instances have in common – and there are others, such as the remarkable insensitivity shown to the proponents of a new opera house at City Gate – is the Prime Minister’s underlying presumption that his own pre-electoral popularity would suffice to see through even his most unpopular and politically dangerous decisions... including the revision of the water and electricity tariffs.
From this perspective, Lawrence Gonzi can almost be seen as the architect of the same political labyrinth in which he is now very clearly lost. It remains to be seen whether he will be able to find his way out in time to avoid a repetition of ‘98, and with it a total collapse of his own administration.
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