The margin of restraint
Abela is overwhelming favourite to win on Saturday. The question is the margin. It will be the margin of restraint on Animal Farm.
Jon Mallia and Mark Laurence Zammit invited Robert Abela for the Każin-Times of Malta debate. He declined at the last minute. Their dream is not his project.
Four years ago, Abela went to the polls as one who promised to implement the recommendations of the Caruana Galizia inquiry to strengthen journalism. Labour’s programme ran to a thousand pledges, headlined by governance reforms and a strategy against corruption.
The subtext: lessons have been learned from the rot of the Muscat era – the Daphne Caruana Galizia assassination, the Vitals hospitals fraud, the brazen impunity of Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri.
The explicit message: vote Labour to change Labour.
The posture has turned out to be an imposture. The inquiry’s recommendations were shelved. Freedom of information has been hollowed. Labour’s electoral programme promises that state broadcasting will continue “to serve its function”, which does not bode well. And the man who presented himself as the answer to Labour’s accountability problem does not show up to be interviewed.
He also does not show up to be corrected. At the Chamber of Commerce debate, he was pressed on Malta’s productivity record. The data is unambiguous: the rise in GDP has been driven overwhelmingly by an expanding labour force, not productivity gains. Abela insisted otherwise.
There are no more lessons for him to learn.
The broken promises of 2022 are simply being re-offered. The Vitals fraud stalled hospital development by a decade; those same projects reappear in the 2026 programme without apology or explanation.
He claims credit for the GDP growth since 2013, years that confused growth with thriving. Quality of life became an electoral issue because construction cranes, fractured buildings and traffic jams became the defining texture of prosperity.
Refusing to take responsibility for the causes, Abela promises to fix the problem – at least on paper with a multi-dimensional well-being index. In place of the parks and green spaces he promised in 2022 – and did not deliver – we will have a measurement of what was taken from us.
Developers and the well-connected did not need a well-being index. Nor do we, to know whether we are thriving. We have our gritted teeth and disturbed sleep. But an index is particularly useful when you control what gets measured and how it is defined.
Abela will continue to call himself a socialist. But all true socialists know the only thing red about this government is the lipstick it puts on the pigs at its trough
Consider the governance record. A law was passed allowing suspected money-launderers – some with government connections – to requalify as mere tax evaders, erasing the question of how the money was earned in the first place.
Ministers no longer declare their spouses’ assets. Direct ministerial orders have broken records – unfortunately, not the right ones.
Six months now stand between a citizen and a magisterial inquiry; requests deemed frivolous attract penalties. Those who investigate ministers are denounced as persecutors while the ministers are cast as victims.
Twenty ministers have left government over scandals since 2013. Resignations come only under sustained public pressure and the disgraced can expect to be recycled into further public appointments.
The prime minister assures us they still have much to offer. But what? And to whom? He’s not giving interviews.
Still, Abela boasts that his cabinet is credible – a rebranding of impunity. The more numerous the scandals, the more fervent the declarations of credibility. They do not offer transparency; they depend on our belief.
And which minister does Abela himself believe – the transport minister, who parades a generational overhaul of public transport, or the finance minister, who has expressed scepticism about the project?
Zammit wanted to ask him that. But the prime minister’s enthusiasm for credibility does not extend to credible journalists.
There is one promise on which Abela himself is credible: the reshaping of the office of chief justice.
When Abela was still, briefly, performing contrition, his government passed a law requiring a two-thirds parliamentary majority to appoint a chief justice. It was a recognition that certain offices should sit above the winning side. His 2026 electoral programme proposes to reverse that moment of bipartisanship.
The programme pledges to “strengthen the process of the appointment of the chief justice”. But, elsewhere, it states that “a democratic country safeguards the will of the majority”: it promises a legal mechanism “to unblock the appointment of roles that require a two-thirds approval” in parliament.
Decoded: the chief justice, an office of state that should be above partisanship, shall be legitimised by the scale of Abela’s election result.
A large majority will be taken as permission. To deny inconvenient statistics. To renege without apology. To treat the state as an extension of the governing party – which rules alone.
Only public pressure has ever produced a U-turn or a resignation. What follows a landslide, in this logic, is freedom from public pressure.
Abela will continue to call himself a socialist. But all true socialists know the only thing red about this government is the lipstick it puts on the pigs at its trough.
Abela is the overwhelming favourite to win on Saturday. The question is the margin. It will be the margin of restraint on Animal Farm.
