Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1358359
10 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 4 APRIL 2021 OPINION Raphael Vassallo It's all going Abela's way… and he knows it JUDGING by the comments underneath the article, I am ev- idently not the only one who was struck by the Prime Minister's nonchalant composure during that Saviour Balzan interview on Xtra this week. Honestly, though: who would ever guess, from his performance last Thursday, that Robert Abe- la's government has been rocked by a series of monumental scan- dals in recent weeks: including the arrest and imprisonment of former OPM chief of staff Keith Schembri… the public confirma- tion that so many of those pre- vious 'allegations' were, in fact, perfectly true… and, much more damningly, a spate of renewed allegations that members of the Labour government may even have been embroiled in Daphne Caruana Galizia's murder? Yet if Abela is any way rattled or perturbed by those, and oth- er scandals… it certainly didn't come across in his demeanour, body-language, or tone of voice. And yes, granted: it could very easily be part of an orchestrated PR stunt, aimed at deflating the sheer gravity of those accusations (the least of which would almost certainly be enough topple any other European government). But I somehow doubt it, myself. I think it is far likelier that Robert Abela is comforted by internal, unpublished polls, suggesting that those developments have not really had much of an effect on his overall popularity at all. And even if no such polls or indi- cations actually exist… there are plenty of other reasons for Robert Abela to breezily dismiss the no- tion that his party's unassailable majority may have been even re- motely dented by recent events. Foremost among them, the undeniable fact – repeatedly confirmed by one survey after another – that politics is very much rooted in the 'here and now'… and that, by extension, people's voting intentions are invariably going to be influenced by the circumstances in which they find themselves in today (as opposed to two, three, four, or even 10 years ago… which is, let's face it, when the crime for which Keith Schembri has been charged actually took place). If so, it suggests that Robert Abela has understood a cru- cial political truism that seems to lie permanently beyond his opponents' grasp. For not only is today's Opposition investing all its energies in exposing the scandals and misdeeds of yes- teryear – none of which, in any case, can realistically be lain at Robert Abela's own door – but, bizarrely, it is even making the ungodly mistake of minimising (or, even worse, trivialising) any concern that is actually rooted in the present. For instance: in the same week of Schembri's arrest, Parliament convened to discuss the imple- mentation of Budget 2022. And believe it or not, Bernard Grech's reaction was to claim that… 'The Budget is irrelevant'. Even the simple fact that he was quoting a classic Eddie Fenech Adami line, from way back in 1986, is already enough to suggest that Bernard Grech (not unlike that Suez Canal car- go ship, until recently) is very firmly 'stuck in the past'. And I need hardly add that 'the past' is not a very good place for any aspiring future Prime Minister to find himself stuck in… espe- cially not when it also forces us to make comparisons with the situation that Eddie Fenech Ad- ami was actually referring to, all those long years ago. To put that another way: was the budget really 'irrelevant', back in 1986? Oh, yes. Abso- lutely. No doubt about it what- soever. And not just because 'The Budget', back then, actually consisted in just an endless lita- ny of millimetric price-changes to basic commodities – a 2c.5 increase in the price of corned beef, or a 5-mil decrease for a rotolo of qarghabaghli, etc. – read aloud by former Finance Minister Wistin Abela (in, it must be said, a soul-crushingly boring monotone)… No, it was 'irrelevant' because the events that overshadowed it in 1986 – the murder of Ray- mond Caruana, the frame-up of Pietru-Pawl Busuttil, and all the rest of it – were all happening right there and then: at that pre- cise instant. So make no mistake: Eddie Fenech Adami was not 'stuck in the past', when he uttered those memorable words over 30 years ago. Very far from it, in fact: it was the government of the time – led by Karmenu Mifsud Bon- nici – that seemed utterly inca- pable of taking cognisance of the realities of its own day. And Ed- die Fenech Adami availed of that Budget debate to remind the government of where its priori- ties should really have been fo- cused… with results (including a seemingly unstoppable series of electoral triumphs for the PN) that are now history. But that was way back in 1986; and – just in case anyone out there needed reminding – we are now in 2021. The year of COVID-19, no less: when an unprecedented number of peo- ple have either lost their jobs, or suffered salary-cuts of up to 25%, or more… and when Mal- ta's entire business community is anxiously awaiting confirma- tion that – among other things – the government will renew its wage-supplement hand-outs; or enact a much-needed recovery plan, to help kick-start the econ- omy after over a year of COV- ID-imposed inactivity… So for today's Opposition lead- er to even think of suggesting that all this is 'irrelevant' – and even then, only because of a political scandal that is in itself a hangover from the preceding administration…. I don't know. On one level, it may just be a reflection of the comfortable so- cio-economic bubble people like Bernard Grech actually live in (it is, after all, very easy to minimise the financial concerns of others, when you yourself are personally unaffected.) But on another level, it also compounds the notion of an Op- position party that is hopelessly – but hopelessly – out of touch with the present-day concerns and aspirations of the Maltese people. And besides: in an ideal world, the Opposition leader shouldn't really need someone like me to tell him that this approach is not only off-putting in the extreme, to the thousands of people who have been severely impacted by the COVID crisis… but it is al- so a sure-fire way of snatching electoral defeat from the jaws of victory. Which brings me to yet an- other possible reason for Robert Abela's smug self-assurance – if not downright complacency - in that interview. It seems to be taking his critics an awful long time to realise that, with every inch of distance that Robert Ab- ela succeeds in placing, between himself and his disgraced pre- decessor… his own party is only likely to emerge ever stronger and more rejuvenated as a result. For let's be honest: when it does come to the next election – which cannot realistically be much more than a year away – the main protagonists of La- bour's campaign are not exact- ly going to be 'Joseph Muscat, Konrad Mizzi, Keith Schembri, Chris Cardona', and all the oth- ers whose reputation now lies in tatters in a skip. On the contrary, it is going to be the likes of Miriam Dal- li, Clyde Caruana, Daniel Jo- se Micallef, and others. And I am unaware of any 'corruption scandal' involving those people in particular… or even, for that matter, that they were in any way involved in the scandals that eventually engulfed the Muscat administration. So to consistently urge Robert Abela to 'denounce the Joseph Muscat legacy' – as so many