If you want to appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of Robert Abela’s position, take a look at what he’s called the “difficult decisions” he’s had to take since January. They say something about his abilities and constraints.
In politics, difficult decisions vary not just in degree. There are entirely different kinds of difficulty.
The purely difficult decisions are those where it’s unclear what you should do. Whatever you decide comes with a high risk of a potentially catastrophic outcome. Every option could have unforeseen, unintended consequences.
The pandemic was one such case. It was unprecedented. Expert information often required revision. Radical uncertainty affected both public health and just how large financial packages could be without endangering the public coffers.
Abela got the pandemic decisions largely right. Malta’s results – as measured by international league tables – were not as great as he describes them. But neither does he deserve a lot of the criticism he’s taken.
(Though if the amnesty on social distancing fines turns out to have been a blanket amnesty, he will not only have lied to the public; he will also have damaged his government’s ability to fight the next pandemic.)
Other decisions are difficult for a completely different kind of reason. These are decisions that create a conflict between morality and law, on the one hand, and your immediate self-interest on the other.
For a principled politician, the decision is easy: it’s a decision for morality and law. For your garden-variety politician, however, it’s a decision based on calculating the chances of getting away with opportunism – particularly if the chances of getting away with it are high, but so are the costs of getting caught.
The decisions on the migrant boats from Libya, during the pandemic, fell into this category. Robert Abela ended up having to bring in migrants he was keeping under arrest at sea. His pushback of some other migrants to Libya can yet have nasty legal consequences.
For him to call these decisions difficult would be a compromising admission. They could only be difficult if he was trying to game the international system while doing something he knew was wrong. For someone who wanted to do what’s right, the decision was easy, even if it came with a heavy burden.
Then there are decisions which, strictly speaking, are not difficult at all. There is really only one thing you can do. So the decision itself is easy. But it comes with consequences that are awkward to handle.
Such were the decisions to force out Chris Cardona and Konrad Mizzi. They were easy because there was no plausible alternative. Given the allegations and suspicions, Cardona and Mizzi would have continued to hog the front pages and mobilise protests.
The economy would have struggled even harder to recover – both because of the protests and because of the increasing damage to Malta’s reputation. The country would appear unstable and its head of government weak and straitjacketed.
The decision was easy but the consequences were difficult. Joseph Muscat, Abela’s predecessor, had operated on the principle of defending his own to the hilt. For Abela, to force out a serving deputy leader, and a former deputy leader, was going to seem like caving in.
Robert Abela is ruthless in preserving his own career. He is ready to roll the dice with other people’s lives if he thinks he can get away with it- Ranier Fsadni
Of course, Muscat used to operate from a position of economic and strategic strength, where enough people calculated that jeopardising Muscat’s position could jeopardise the economy. The moment that equation was reversed, and the very presence of Muscat appeared to jeopardise the Labour government’s stability, the Panama Gang was cleared out of Castille.
But its presence in this Parliament seemed guaranteed. It needed two new shocks – the pandemic’s impact on the economy and the Montenegro scandal – to change the equation.
The expulsion of Mizzi had long been obviously necessary, if Labour was not to be seen as shielding a man with a finger in every scandal. It was only the potential backlash from the Labour base that held it back. An economic downturn and a fresh scandal helped make the backlash manageable. Enough of the Labour base now understood that it was Mizzi’s presence that threatened the Labour government, not his expulsion.
Once Cardona and Mizzi departed, it made it easier for Muscat to decide to go by the end of summer. Prior to their departure, the two were attracting all the public fire. In their absence, and with Keith Schembri and Montenegro increasingly in the spotlight, Muscat was going to begin to attract too much attention to himself.
I doubt he needed much persuading that it was in his interest to go. But it is unlikely that it would have happened so fast had events not made Cardona’s and Mizzi’s positions untenable. The way it happened spared Abela any embarrassment.
What does all this say about Abela’s abilities and the hand he’s been dealt? First, he is ruthless in preserving his own career. He is ready to roll the dice with other people’s lives if he thinks he can get away with it. He can hug you tight in January and force you out in June.
Second, he is lucky but also exploits his luck. He can turn bad news for the economy and national reputation into the leverage he needs to force out someone who seemed incapable of being dislodged.
Third, however, he is lucky from a position of weakness. His achievements so far have been tactical not strategic. He has seized his chances but they have been imposed by external events. He does not yet operate from a position of strategic strength, like Muscat.
It may take a general election to give him that strength. Which is why he may yet toy with the idea of an early election, next year perhaps, even if he’d really rather not.