It’s been almost 200 years since Napoleon’s death, yet here we are still evaluating politicians using Bonapartist criteria. Do Robert Abela’s one-on-one relations with his troops mean he has charisma? Is he the real deal or a poor copy of a predecessor? Will we judge him by the number of memos he’s able to dictate simultaneously in reforming the shambles left by Joseph Muscat?

The media has already moved from discounting Abela to mythologising him. There is no evidence of a sudden, last-week campaign turnaround in his favour – not with polls consistently showing a high rate of non-committal answers. That in itself should have been a warning sign to Chris Fearne, the man everyone including the voters assumed was the favourite. It was a limited electorate, with respondents having good reason to suspect that their identity could have been easily tagged to their answers. They hid their doubts.

There is also no evidence of Abela’s charisma. There cannot be. It’s too early.

Colloquially, ‘charisma’ has come to mean something like ‘celebrity attractiveness’ – a smiling warmth in one-on-one relations with strangers. Abela has this; but so did Archbishop Paul Cremona, who early on was also credited with ‘charisma’ by the media, and yet whose many qualities do not include the kind of leadership that charisma – the real thing – represents.

Real charisma has the quality of prophecy. It is acquired through struggle against the odds. The charismatic leader defies and denounces conventional wisdom. It’s not the individual who is born with charisma but the circumstances – the nature of the political struggle – that confer it. It is the followers that project it.

Some charismatic leaders, like John Paul II, or Mohammed V of Morocco, do have an ineffable quality of presence. But Margaret Thatcher? She was a country-club bore with a shrill voice until the Falklands war and power-mad union leaders magnetised her. Donald Trump? All he had was celebrity charisma until his political adversaries turned him into a figure with the power to shake the foundations of polite statecraft – which is what Trump’s voters want.

It is the semblance of this struggle that Muscat sought in order to convert himself, from a gauche speaker with a nerd’s goatee, into someone whose word could override the judgement of everyone else in the Labour Party. It’s why in the early years he projected himself as ‘underdog’. It’s why in the last days he spoke of himself as though the sacrificial Lamb who took on the sins of the world (the sins of his own administration and the far, far greater sins – to hear him speak – of his envious adversaries).

So it is not to denigrate Abela to say he cannot possibly as yet have charisma, the kind that counts in politics. He has not had to struggle ever. He is so far still a cipher. The charismatic figure has ‘vision’ – he sees far and deep, more than other eyes can see. Abela won by claiming he has ‘hearing’ – listening to what his voters wanted and promising to deliver it.

To credit him with charisma now is simply to perpetuate the same mistake the media committed in discounting him. It focuses on the imaginary. It twists the world to fit conventional wisdom, rather than calibrate one’s judgements in the light of the facts.

The critics, too, are in large part focusing on the imaginary. For them, Abela’s cipher-like quality is a defect. It shows he is vacuous. They focus on his poor public speaking, the stilted gestures, the smile that does not reach the eyes.

At this stage, the optics are irrelevant. Muscat was a poor speaker and ham actor at the start. People forget just how easily, in 2008, Lawrence Gonzi was able to put him down on camera; and how many rhetorical strategies Muscat tried before calibrating the right approach. (Remember Muscat’s sorry attempt at addressing Gonzi as “Lawrence” in a Xarabank debate?) In the longer term, what counted was that Muscat was cold enough to take the right critical advice.

The critics are also forgetful when they say with such certainty that Abela will be under Muscat’s control. A dozen or so years ago they’d said Muscat would be Alfred Sant’s puppet. Yeah, right.

Abela has no reason to love [Joseph] Muscat. He has plenty of reasons to learn from him

The critics forget more. Abela was active in his father’s leadership campaign back in 2008, which pitted him against Muscat. Abela knows every dirty trick the pro-Muscat team played in that campaign – including the targeting of Abela’s sister. (Muscat denied involvement and publicly condemned the tactic. But it just so happens that that little trick was identical to one Muscat himself had publicly played, targeting Lou Bondì’s eldest daughter, a few years earlier.)

Abela has no reason to love Muscat. He has plenty of reasons to learn from him, though. He sidled up to Muscat. He offered him support. He even gained the active service of Muscat’s OPM officials in his leadership campaign. Feel free to believe that makes him Muscat’s puppet. I prefer to see ruthlessness, flexibility, and a readiness to wait a dozen years.

Critics will protest. They will point to personnel changes he has not made – if he wanted to pass their tests. But the fact is that Abela isn’t sitting for their tests. Not just yet. Not the tests of liberal critics at home, nor of the ones abroad.

Eventually, those tests will matter. Immediately, however, the main test is to stabilise and secure his control over the Labour Party. No rational politician, who has leapfrogged over his Cabinet colleagues the way Abela has, would take out all his adversaries in one fell swoop.

To do that would be to perpetuate uncertainty and division. It would create a lobby out of the losers. He doesn’t even yet know for sure what unsuspected hold they might have on power. Better to wait, test their own opportunism, and, only if necessary, get rid of them by weakening them individually.

As for the vacuity of his message to the nation, that too has its advantages. To his real audience, the core Labour vote, he said he would stick to promises made in 2017. As for the real, objective problems he has to grapple with, he has left his hands free, not bound by any commitments.

Eventually, vision will count. So will experience. Binding commitments will need to be made. The government will need to be re-moulded. The ghost of Daphne Caruana Galizia, the sins of Muscat, Keith Schembri and their minions, and the myriad other problems that prematurely age prime ministers, will haunt his waking hours and sleep.

Then we’ll be able to judge if he is vacuous or not, and just how fast a learner he is. But to keep track of all that, we first have to fend off the present illusions of choirboys and critics alike.

ranierfsadni@europe.com