When the COVID pandemic first hit us, our world was turned upside down. Five years later, it is still around but attracts little or no news value. We have become immune to it.
It is the same story with the Labour sleaze pandemic.
A few weeks before the 2013 general election, the party’s then deputy leader, Anġlu Farrugia passed a comment on a member of the judiciary. He was, in his own words, “stabbed in the back” by a clean-image Joseph Muscat who needed a moderate deputy leader, Louis Grech, to be part of his team when he went to the polls. I was not surprised Grech called it a day years ago.
Once in Castille, only a few months later, Muscat asked for the resignation of a minister whose driver fired a gun at a passing car. A second minister was told to resign after the publication of a report by the auditor general about a property expropriation.
For a time, it seemed that accountability and political responsibility was still with us. However, this soon disappeared when Farrugia seemed to have been promised that he would remain as Speaker of the House as long as Labour was in office and the above-mentioned ministers were simply reappointed to different ministerial roles.
In 2016, a new level of immunity was reached when the Panama Papers scandal broke. Instead of sacking Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri, Muscat, as prime minister, claimed these two individuals were “indispensable” for the successful running of the country.
Meanwhile these “indispensable” people were allegedly secretly conspiring with foreign fraudsters to betray the country with a series of multi-million kickback scams involving hospitals, windfarms and other private-public energy deals.
By the 2017 election, most of the electorate had accepted top-level corruption and arrogance as the new normal. Castille cover-ups and state-funded propaganda took care of the rest.
The brutal murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia gave rise to various pro-democracy civil society organisations. An unsettled Minister Owen Bonnici was subsequently condemned by the courts for ordering the night removal of flowers that were placed at her makeshift memorial every day. As arrogance was the new norm, he did not resign.
Robert Abela brought no change. He tolerates sleaze and corruption as much as Joseph Muscat did- Eddie Aquilina
Labour’s impunity on the EU level was different. By 2019, all major European parties, including the social democrats, had begun to avoid any personal contact with Muscat. He could not attend EU meetings without being cold-shouldered by his counterparts.
He came to realise that he and his mates had overplayed their hand. After a long, late-night meeting, and upon reaching agreement on a substitute prime minister, they silently walked off the main stage.
Robert Abela brought no change. He tolerates sleaze and corruption as much as Muscat did. Like the latter, he manages it by moving chess pieces around the party’s board. When faced with internal party dissent, he silences his critics with some party promotion or a posting within the diplomatic corps.
The Rosianne Cutajar saga is classic Abela handling. She was caught avoiding tax on undeclared income and also admitting privately to “pigging out” on an ITS job that the auditor general said was “fraudulent” and “irregular”.
Abela follows a classic pantomime script. He first jumps to her defence and, days later, forces her to resign from the Labour Party, insisting that she will not return before a making an apology.
After a disappointing EU election result, Abela then welcomes Cutajar back to the party, claiming that she had “paid the highest political price” and that “all of us deserve a second chance”. The question remains: for a second chance at what, exactly?
Malta needs saving.