Robert Abela is abandoning convention upon convention of normal democratic life at every turn. He no longer governs within the strictures of constitutionality; he governs by what he can get away with. He doesn’t know how far he can go before he needs to stop but he understands better than anyone that no one has stopped him yet. And maybe that means no one ever will.
Understand that he does not necessarily need to act explicitly illegally to be dancing outside constitutional norms. The constitution and the country’s laws are, by definition, incomplete. The imagination of their authors limits them. They only list what they figured would need to be forbidden and leave out behaviour they never expected to have to provide redress or punishment for explicitly.
Each pushback, each break with tradition and each rushed legislative initiative appears on its own to be harmless. How many times must one pronounce the death of democracy before the extended dirge becomes ridiculous and uninteresting? How many small bursts of dictatorial backsliding could amount to the last straw? The irony is that each new downgrade of formerly accepted democratic norms makes past disasters look harmless. After all, democracy has survived all those nails in its coffin. Surely, it will survive the next one, too.
I don’t know if what’s left still meets the requirements that, say, 20 years ago we would have expected from democracy. I rather think it doesn’t. But if this still is a democracy, it’s a different one. It’s one where political leaders have legitimised the personal monetisation of their power and criminalised opposition to corruption as a fringe activity, an indulgence of extremists. That was never our understanding of how politicians wanted the community to perceive them.
God knows there’s always been corruption. What’s new is the newly found pride in it. Greed – in politics, as had once been the exclusive purview of business – is good.
Consider declarations of assets. For decades, government ministers informed parliament of their wealth in yearly public declarations of their income and assets. The point was that a minister’s salary was known and no minister should have been able to be richer from one year to the next by more than their salary could allow. Ministers who belonged to a couple in a community of acquests were bound to declare their spouses’ income and assets, too.
Until 2014. Joseph Muscat’s Labour government abolished the requirement that spouses declare their income, raising suspicions that corrupt ministers could hide illegitimate income or the ownership of secret companies in the names of their spouses instead of their own.
In 2023, the OECD recommended improvements to the system on declaring assets, suggesting ways of closing existing loopholes. They said the system should be extended to persons of trust (to reduce the chance of corrupt ministers using fronts to cover up bribes).
They said they should declare intangibles like cars, antiques or artwork because bribes can be paid in kind. They said ministers should have to declare when a change happens to their loans or their income. Ministers should have to categorise their interests to avoid ambiguity. None of these recommendations were taken up.
They change laws to remove any restraint on their power- Manuel Delia
Instead, without announcing their decisions, ministers have decided to abolish the long-held practice of giving an account of their income and assets to parliament, the institution to which they are constitutionally held accountable. That’s it. They no longer do it. This means the information is no longer available online and no longer subject to anything like the effective public scrutiny that was standard up to now.
Does this prove that ministers are profiting unlawfully? They would claim that increasing opacity in their affairs does not prove wrongdoing. The custom of giving an account to parliament is not required by law and, therefore, not doing so is not illegal. This is precisely what I mean when I say that the defining limit of their conduct is now all that they think they can get away with.
The law itself is not a barrier because their grip on parliament is so tight that there is no separation between the power to make laws and the function of acting within their limits. It’s in that context that one must observe them legislate to remove or severely restrict a citizen’s right to ask for a magisterial inquiry into crimes they commit when the police they appoint refuse to do their duty. It’s in that context that one must observe them criminalise “defamation” to empower themselves to sic the police on their critics. They change laws to remove any restraint on their power.
They are also going in the opposite direction of outstanding recommendations by international agencies to improve Malta’s notoriously weak ability to fight corruption. The Group of States Against Corruption (GRECO) has reported that Malta ignored all but two of its 23 recommendations for reform.
The European Commission has observed that none of its headline recommendations for reforms to the rule of law have been implemented. “Partial progress” is the best they can say when they receive yet another government report full of promises and bereft of results. The OECD’s recommendations to improve standards in public life and the OSCE’s recommendations to improve transparency in elections are perpetually ignored.
Abela looks elsewhere for inspiration and governance standard-setting. Ian Borg was among the few international guests at Donald Trump’s inauguration. He says he had the time of his life. Of course, he did. He was in good company: Argentina, India, Italy, and Malta. The march of the far right on governments of former democracies is a sound heard outside our country, too.
It’s not the sound of goose-stepping boots. It’s the sound of cash clinking in the pockets of the powerful. It’s happening in more places around the globe. But we must first mourn what we’re losing.