Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/906955
maltatoday SUNDAY 26 NOVEMBER 2017 Opinion 26 If you're going to 'rebel'... do it properly D amn. Why do I never learn that certain impulses are there to be acted upon... instead of only written about in articles from time to time? Last month, I predicted that Opposition leader Adrian Delia would be roundly defeated in his bid to stop lesbian couples from claiming sick leave when availing of IVF treatment abroad. I ended that article with the line: "I might just run down to the nearest bookie (any old street corner, these days) to place a bet before the first gong. Here: it's €10 on the lesbians... KO in the first round. Anyone willing to offer decent odds?" Why, oh why, did I not place that bet? Whatever the odds, I'd be 'X' amount richer than I am today. Not only was it indeed a spectacular KO in the first round... but Delia emerged from the encounter so thoroughly beaten up, that it is debatable whether the party he leads can still claim to even exist at all. And this, I must confess, is something I did not predict in that article. What I expected was for Delia's ill-conceived motion to be duly out voted in parliament... and that the fall-out would include the irreversible loss of both the LGBTIQ lobby, as well as the progressive Nationalist vote in general. But I didn't expect the entire PN to also spontaneously combust like that; or at least, not quite so suddenly and emphatically. In practice, what happened last Thursday was that Adrian Delia entered the House with 28 MPs representing the Nationalist Party – plus another two representing its junior 'coalition partner', the PD – only to stagger out reeling a couple of hours later... with only 21 seats to his name. Incredible as this may seem, the PN somehow managed to lose seven whole parliamentary seats in one fell swoop... and it would have been eight, too, had another Nationalist MP (Claudette Buttigieg) also been present for the vote. Meanwhile, the Opposition as a whole – including PD – lost nine seats. In the 20-odd years I've been writing about politics in Malta, I have quite frankly never seen anything even remotely comparable to a fiasco of this magnitude. The only instance that comes close was the public spat between Dom Mintoff and Alfred Sant in 1998. The fall-out of that encounter was arguably much more serious in the short-term – Sant's government collapsed as a result – but that's only because Labour happened to be in government at the time, while Delia's PN is currently in Opposition. (What would have happened had Delia lost seven seats... as Prime Minister? I shudder to even imagine.) And even then, only because Sant had tied the Cottonera project issue to a vote of confidence in his own government... which he went on to lose. Already you can see certain parallels. The jury is still out over whether Sant would have been able to weather that storm, had he not made the Raphael Vassallo There are two PNs represented in the House; the 21 seats controlled by Delia and the seven seats contolled by a rebel faction led (or so it seems) by Simon Busuttil