The countdown has started. Admittedly, it is still a theoretical one since nobody knows the exact date of the big test. Not even the man who has the prerogative to decide it has yet made up his mind – and the one event that closed off 2007 must have taken Lawrence Gonzi’s levels of indecisions to unprecedented heights as Alfred Sant’s ill-health has derailed any conceivable plan and strategy so far.
But a countdown it is, and until the prime minister gets to decide the date, the facts are that the present Parliament’s life ends officially on 23 May and an election has to be called not more than three months later; that would be Saturday, 23 August.
As things stand, the unfolding political year looks uncannily similar to 1971, when Gorg Borg Olivier was ousted by the fiery perit: Labour leader for 22 years, and prime minister for just three tumultuous years between 1955 and 1958.
Sant’s health permitting, he will be contesting against a 20-year-old ruling party with few changes bar an anointed leader who has not yet won one single election, surrounded by an ageing and fatigued Cabinet characterised by incompetence, inefficacy and corruption.
Alfred Sant is known to be inspired by great leaders, and Dom Mintoff – Sant’s own nemesis for the last decade – must be one of them when he ponders the fate of his political CV, so far epitomised by his two-year administration disastrously aborted in the long hot summer of 1998.
On the opposing camp, Gonzi looks more and more like Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici in his final months in Castille in 1987; postponing, delaying, and putting everything on hold in the hope that something might save him from the abyss. Just like Mifsud Bonnici, Gonzi also became prime minister during the legislature.
Not having won one single election at the helm – except that for party leader in 2004, having been informally pipped for the post by Eddie Fenech Adami himself – the stakes for Gonzi are high, although he does believe that a general may lose all the battles but somehow still win the war.
While it is true that Gonzi has started the New Year patting himself on the back for the economic turnaround he achieved against the massive deficit left by his predecessor, now sitting comfortably at the Presidents’ Palace, few if any voters would rush to the ballot with the economy in mind unless a veritable trickle-down effect sinks in. Besides, the longer he takes to call the election, the more the economy is bound to get irremediably jammed.
And just like in 1971, the rising cost of living, compounded by the euro price hike scare, is bound to get the people to vote with their pockets.
Beyond the economy, Gonzi would be right to speak gladly about the targets he set and kept, although the costs and the blunders by his predecessors will have to be inevitably weighed in as well.
So Mater Dei is a success for Gonzi but speaks millions of liri in cost overruns spanning over 15 years, thanks to his health minister and an aloof Eddie Fenech Adami.
Smart City is a great project for branding Malta on the world map but it has been politically blown out of proportion in an attempt to downplay its real estate value given for free to the Dubai regime.
Malta’s membership into the European Union is now politically undisputed even by the inconsistent Opposition, but Gonzi’s administration has been utterly incapable of living up to the European benchmarks sold to the electorate before the 2003 referendum.
Among the missed targets, the Opposition is mainly focused on disastrous roads, cost overruns, corruption and a little bridge that the Romans, millennia ago, would have completed in a month. 3
7 But the one target set by Gonzi he has abysmally failed to reach is his promise, right on the day of his swearing in, to start “a new way of doing politics”.
He immediately showed everyone he wasn’t serious about it by appointing his political godfather as President against the very Nationalist pundits’ wishes, who came out vociferously lambasting him for how he turned matters of the state into a sort of family business.
He rubbed it in by keeping effectively the same Cabinet, except for the discovery of Tonio Fenech and the accidental promotion of Michael Frendo in the wake of the disastrous fallout with John Dalli.
Add to all that the empty rhetoric about party financing, the “new” electoral laws that just serve to consolidate the dominance of the two major parties, and his failure to enact modern legislation such as the Freedom of Information Act that would have given him legitimacy when he talks about transparency, Gonzi’s “new way of doing politics” is rendered pretty much insubstantial.
Gonzi faces another element set out to rob his votes: Azzjoni Nazzjonali, headed by the former Nationalist MP Josie Muscat, although this far-right party will find it hard to garner the sympathy of pale blue Nationalists on the liberal spectrum. They are more likely to appeal to the xenophobic elements within Labour, but then again few Labourites would sacrifice their chance of a decade to see their party in power.
For the Labour leader, the stakes might be even higher than those for Gonzi. Considered by the PN as their greatest asset given his erratic leadership and strategic blunders, for Sant it is a do or die election. Since 1998, his political career has been one gross misjudgement that has cost his party a decade of opposition against all odds. But surrounded by utterly weak and gutless officials, he saved his own position while ousting all those around him, somehow reinventing Labour without changing its 15-year-old face since he took over from Mifsud Bonnici in 1992.
But “a life or death election” is actually the very declaration made by PN Secretary General Joe Saliba, shortly after disembarking from construction magnate Zaren Vassallo’s luxury yacht at the end of last summer.
“It’s a life or death election. I do not have the slightest doubt,” he told MaltaToday.
He also added, quite prematurely, that his homework was all done. “Our strategy is ready. Whenever the Prime Minister calls an election we are ready,” Saliba said.
With the strategy group back to the drawing board having to rethink the campaign while Sant recovers his health, Saliba might as well brave the stormy sea on Zaren’s boat in preparation for the months to come.

kschembri@mediatoday.com.mt