2023 was a momentous if turbulent year, most notably for Malta’s leadership. Albatrosses still hang around its neck from the Muscat administration.
But rather than be frank with their supporters about the daylight robbery inflicted upon the Maltese, Robert Abela is still defending the indefensible.
In an interview on what is meant to be our national broadcaster, the prime minister kicked off the year by attempting to set the tone for his party’s upcoming campaign.
He dedicated it to describing the contours of Labour cloud cuckoo land and attacked anyone who dared oppose his own sanctity.
Corruption, if it was real, was not really a problem, albeit certain hiccups may have led him to set some hardworking and capable talent aside. His press advisers appear to insist that he very carefully omits any reference to Daphne Caruana Galizia. The traumatic scandal that was the politically motivated assassination of a journalist is now downplayed as one among “certain incidents”.
Abela is on a mission to blatantly downplay Malta’s recent dark history for which his party is responsible.
Rather than address the recommendations of the public inquiry, the prime minister has opted to gaslight the public about ground-breaking reforms that never happened.
Dissent is an invitation to enter his propaganda machine’s crosshairs. Labour’s new grand strategy for the way forward is to dredge up that condemned playbook that drew the ire of our courts, of civil society and of international organisations. Any pretence to improving public standards is a bad joke.
While the president appeals for toned down partisanship, Labour is now adopting demonisation campaigns as a technique once again; of course, not because of a misguided belief that this benefits society or the country in any way. Vitriolic discourse is meant to hide their leader’s track record of weak decisions, U-turns, and flimsy grandstanding among his peers.
Speaking of dredging things up, Abela now believes he can excite his core by inviting back old acolytes who were caught in wrongdoing and were too arrogant to apologise.
For Abela, the “ultimate price” has been paid by Rosianne Cutajar, the same Cutajar who admitted guzzling down taxpayer money with a fake job, merely because “everyone else” did the same. Surely by “everyone else” she does not mean the 800 or so people who ended up with a criminal record because government fixers sold them a fraudulent benefit after catching them at a vulnerable point in life, with barely enough income to make it to the end of the week.
For Abela, Cutajar, who admitted her sham consultancy to the man accused of ordering a citizen’s assassination in cold blood, suffered enough by being deprived of a fake salary for a few months.
The politically motivated assassination of a journalist is now downplayed as one among ‘certain incidents’- David Casa
There was only one person who paid the “ultimate price”. And Daphne Caruana Galizia is the only woman who cannot defend herself in this whirlwind of tosh that the public is being subjected to.
Neither she, nor the country have seen convincing reforms that get close to ensuring that what happened to Daphne does not happen to anyone else.
On the contrary, the same discourse is back.
Our prime minister is no longer in control of his own narrative. An array of humiliations has invited elements in his own party to wrestle control and strongarm his discourse back to the time of his predecessor in an effort to demonise any affront to his authority.
In other words, Abela has decided to double down on his traitor rhetoric against those who still cause him headaches.
This is exactly what he did to me in his interview, warning that his mighty government was barely managing to hold on for dear life after the powerful attacks executed by Roberta Metsola and David Casa in Brussels.
It is embarrassing that Abela still believes that theft, embezzlement, abuse of power and corruption somehow represent Malta. It is not in the country’s interest, certainly not in the interest of the Maltese and Gozitan people, to cover for those who stole and pigged out off citizens’ backs and let them get away with it.
No amount of threats and hard language will convince me that remaining silent about Labour’s corruption is in the national interest. Nor is Abela able to articulate such a bizarre argument without launching another tirade against those who refuse to allow the corrupt to carry on enriching themselves off the back of the Maltese public.
It would be in the public interest to see our prime minister take at least as much offence at the Opposition doing its job as at the many instances of corruption.
He seems unfazed by the black-on-white evidence of his trusted deputies gorging on fake consultancies, unbothered by the trading in influence to secure votes by allowing incompetent drivers onto our roads, unperturbed by officials engaged in a fraudulent benefit scheme that they enticed the vulnerable into, and totally indifferent to the €400 million daylight robbery of the Maltese that his colleagues engineered.
Corruption goes. What irks Robert Abela is David Casa refusing to allow the corrupt to get away with it.