The prime minister drew plenty of scoffs when, on Sunday, he declared that the country has returned to normality. Given all the rot recently uncovered in the police force, and with dire warnings of more, the scoffing was obviously deserved. But one jibe – that he’s living in fantasy land – missed the crucial point.
Robert Abela is under no illusions. He knows that merely restoring ‘normality’ prevents the restoration of Malta’s reputation. But he also knows that restoring national reputation – impossible without taking action against all the suspected criminal elements associated with Joseph Muscat’s government – risks destabilising Labour.
He must know more than most of us do about the rot still to come to public light, and yet more that might remain hidden. Nor was he lying to his particular audience. He was simply answering the narrow question troubling it.
For the audience of party activists, a return to normality is a return to stable, unchallenged rule without massive public protests. Normality means the containment of problems, not their disappearance.
Abela was trying to keep up their morale in the face of the evident problems. However, he evidently knows that such restoration, on its own, might even lead to another crisis.
There was an inherent instability that led to the November protests. It took over two years to boil over the last time but there’s no guarantee it will need that long again.
One sign is last week’s performance by the Council of Europe’s rapporteur, Pieter Omtzigt. All the attention was on how Omtzigt publicly wagged a finger at Owen Bonnici. But theatrical flourishes pass. The real troubling sign was another.
Omtzigt is talking as though the problem is not just a system failure that can be repaired. His overall rhetoric is of a system that’s operated by irresponsible individuals.
He doesn’t just have a problem with the dishonesty that has been exposed. He’s accusing the honest people of being out of their depth. That’s the message behind the chiding that, as a country, we entered into all the high-risk areas without having anywhere near the necessary investment in safety features and warning systems.
The restoration of reputation needs reform of behaviour,as well
He’s not accusing us of lacking statesmen. He’s accusing us of lacking a sense of the responsibilities of being a State.
Before anyone squeals about neo-colonialism, he’s not saying we’re children needing tutelage.
He’s accusing our leaders of being adults behaving like children.
He’s not trying to strip us of responsibility. He wants us to assume it. Given the privileges we enjoy in the European family of states, our behaviour – risky and careless – is endangering the security not just of Maltese citizens but of other European polities as well.
That, at any rate, is Omtzigt’s argument. He’s not speaking in a merely personal capacity. He clearly has the backing of the Council of Europe. We can expect he has particular backing from most EU member states, even if they don’t express themselves as forcefully.
That is what makes the current normal unsustainable. It’s on a collision course with several European partners. The more time passes, the weaker our negotiating position becomes. There will come a point where the need to restore reputation quickly leads to making more concessions than we would be ready to make in other circumstances.
Abela’s problem is that his ‘normality’, which makes his core activists breathe a sigh of relief, continues to inflict damage on our reputation. He says he is committed to institutional reform. But the restoration of reputation needs reform of behaviour, as well.
That means, first, action taken against all those under reasonable suspicion of criminal activity or complicity. Second, it means a new norm of behaviour: a public service ethos to replace the corrosive impact of ultra-partisanship that enabled a lot of the sleaze.
Consider this. On Monday, at a hearing of the Daphne Caruana Galizia public inquiry, a question was asked of Josef Caruana, who has worked at the Office of the Prime Minister since 2017.
The question concerned his social media posts, their partisan content and the people they targeted.
Caruana brushed the question aside. I’m not a public officer, he said; I’m a person of trust. And that has, in fact, been the standard reply over the past seven years whenever persons of trust were queried about public statements targeting civil society.
But this is a post-2013 norm. Previously, being a person of trust signalled the way you were recruited. After that, you were bound by the standard of behaviour required of the role you filled. There was no toleration of a person, paid out of public funds, who publicly insulted members of civil society.
Now, there are currently circa 700 persons of trust. The issue is not just the number but the ethos they operate under. Seven hundred is a critical mass that can set the tone of the government.
It’s also a measure of the practical contradiction that Abela faces. For him to succeed, he needs to change the ethos of government and behaviour of public officials. But to effect the change to a new normal, he has to use personnel selected for their talents in imposing a different norm – the very one that could frustrate Abela’s mission to restore national reputation.