Simon Busuttil has moved on quite a bit since he entered parliament... as a parliamentary reporter for Times of Malta in the early 1990s. Chris Scicluna reports.

The former Opposition leader is leaving local politics after being one of its key figures for some seven years. But it will be far from his retirement. He will become general secretary of the European People’s Party, the biggest political grouping in Brussels.

His appointment is deserved recognition for a politician whose relatively short political life was characterised by gritty determination in the face of steep uphill battles.

Busuttil burst into the public arena when the Fenech Adami government in 1999 put him in charge of providing government information about the European Union ahead of the accession referendum of 2003. Busuttil, who by this time was also one of Malta’s top specialists on EU law, also took part in the accession negotiations.

The ‘Yes’ vote in the EU referendum and Malta’s subsequent membership were a credit to him almost as much as they were to Fenech Adami and then chief negotiator Richard Cachia Caruana. Busuttil was criticised by the then Labour Opposition for campaigning for EU membership, but the Malta-EU Information Centre official insisted he was just providing the facts.

Busuttil kept up his momentum by standing for the European Parliament elections a year later, winning 58,899 votes. Those elections set him up against the person who would be his rival through his political life in Malta, Joseph Muscat, who after Labour’s EU U-turn was elected with 36,958 votes. Four years later, Busuttil won the EP re-election with 68,782 first preference votes, a record which still holds.

But his personal success was not mirrored by the PN, which in 2008 only slithered into government, winning a slim, relative – but not absolute – majority.

Perhaps, with hindsight, it was the worst thing that could have happened to the PN. Focused as it became on a fast deteriorating international economic situation and a war in next-door Libya, the party’s slippery slope started.

Embattled prime minister Lawrence Gonzi summoned Busuttil to Malta as his ‘special representative’ in an effort to give his tired-looking party a fresh face as Labour surged under new leader Muscat. In 2012 Busuttil replaced Tonio Borg as PN deputy leader.

The PN, however, was defeated by a landslide in 2013 and Muscat became prime minister. Gonzi immediately stepped down. Busuttil, now an MP, succeeded him, seen by most PN councillors as the natural choice for change, even though a number of MPs were reportedly against him at the time. 

The situation he faced could not be tougher. While Muscat five years earlier had taken over a Labour Party that was financially sound, well organised and on the verge of being elected, Busuttil found himself heading a party reeling from a humiliating defeat at the polls, labouring under a mountain of debt and lacking confidence in itself. 

It was not an easy start. Daphne Caruana Galizia herself lambasted him in a blog in July 2013, telling him to ‘get a grip’ and saying he was really not shaping up as a natural-born leader.

Joseph Muscat once said that someone enters politics either because he is a thief, a missionary or a madman. It is very clear that Simon Busuttil’s entry into politics was a principled one.

Muscat built on Gonzi’s success in holding the economy together and generated a feel-good factor which was to continue throughout his premiership. It was a feeling which Busuttil never managed to dent.

Busuttil, however, became an early warning light of the problems of good governance and corruption that were to undermine the country’s moral values, its international reputation and ultimately, Muscat’s own premiership.

His repeated warnings on rule of law were at best underestimated, at worst, ignored and ridiculed. That, combined with the fact that Busuttil hardly touched on anything else meant that the PN appeared to be unprepared as an alternative government and made no improvement when a snap general election was held in 2017.

Busuttil did the honourable thing and resigned. But was it the right thing?

“I think Simon Busuttil will forever be asking himself whether he should have stepped down as party leader in 2017,” says Steve Mallia, former editor-in-chief of Times of Malta.

“Given the size of his electoral defeat, he no doubt felt he had little option especially after his anti-corruption campaign was overwhelmingly rejected by the voting public.

“But while it was a political mistake to make corruption the sole issue in a country unscrupulously riding the wave of an economic boom – and ally himself so closely to the claims of a former employee of the disgraced Pilatus Bank without possessing independent evidence – today he might feel he could have been able to turn that corner given how events have unfolded, or at least that he deserved to have another crack at it.”

Journalist and academic Fr Joe Borg said Busuttil was courageous enough not to pander to short-term economic gains but to aspire for higher ones.

“He paid a high electoral price for it. His actions were an example to anyone who prefers a principled conviction to compromise.

“Joseph Muscat once said that someone enters politics either because he is a thief, a missionary or a madman. It is very clear that Simon Busuttil’s entry into politics was a principled one and the missionary description is the best to describe him with,” Fr Borg added.

Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, a former Nationalist MP who quit the party in 2012, said Busuttil contributed immensely to Malta’s EU membership campaign and was an effective, hard-working MEP.

“His success at a European level was not replicated locally... faced with a situation where the popularity of his party was plummeting he frantically tried to retain its core voters by taking hardline stances which were actually counterproductive. Many have now turned against the party, which is perceived as being uninspiring, far too negative and – at times – even working against the national interest abroad for petty partisan reasons,” Pullicino Orlando said.

He said Busuttil had also failed to rectify the disastrous financial situation he inherited, and this contributed to the lacklustre and ineffectual campaigns.

Apart from the argument over whether he should have resigned, hindsight may have also revealed two other mistakes by Busuttil – his decision to form a coalition with Partit Demokratiku, and his piloting of a party reform to leave it to the party membership to elect the new party leader.

The coalition idea looked good at the time, especially given the complexities of Malta’s electoral system based on the first preference vote, but it ultimately cost the PN two parliamentary seats with no return.

The direct election of the party leader by the membership does not appear to have achieved the desired results either. If anything it has divided the party. But that does not mean the new method is intrinsically wrong. Party members, like everyone else, vote for the prime minister. Why shouldn’t they be trusted to vote for the party leader?

“What has happened to the Nationalist Party is nothing short of tragic due in no small part to the acrimony between those who believe that Busuttil should have stayed on and those who believe Adrian Delia could have broader appeal. The future does not bode well,” says Mallia.

Pullicino Orlando says it will be challenging for Busuttil’s successor to address the situation he left behind him.

“Nowadays, few consider the Nationalist Party as having the potential to present itself as a credible alternative to the Labour led government. Many of those who turned their backs on the party in the past years, myself included, look at the sorry state a once powerful political machine has been reduced to in disbelief.”

Resignation was particularly painful for Busuttil as he was mocked by those whose resignation he had long demanded – Muscat, Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri.

The murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, a month after he gave up the helm of the Nationalist Party rocked, but also energised Busuttil. It was the evidence he did not want that unchecked corruption bred impunity, with huge consequences for the country. It became his mission, with others, to get justice.

But he received another, unexpected, political bodyblow in the summer of 2018 when, in the wake of the publication of excerpts from the conclusions of the Egrant inquiry report, new Opposition leader Adrian Delia dismissed him from the shadow minister, where he handled good governance, and demanded his resignation from the party.

True to form, and backed by an unprecedented #notinmyname campaign by senior MPs, Busuttil stayed on. He quickly made it clear he was unconvinced by the inquiry’s findings. In many people’s views, the jury is still out.

Karma came for Busuttil late last year when developments in the Caruana Galizia murder investigations led to the resignation of Muscat, Mizzi and Schembri.

And in an ironic twist, just weeks after their departure in disgrace, Busuttil’s appointment to the post of general secretary of the Popular Party was announced.

“Dr Busuttil is returning to what has always been his most natural calling and, given his work ethic and expertise in the field, I have no doubt he will make a great success of his new role,” said Mallia.

Busuttil may go down in history as the first PN leader not to have become prime minister but many will remember him for commanding the high moral high ground.

His perseverance no doubt contributed to Muscat’s downfall and may go a long way to a restoration of good governance.