“And I got away with it, too…”

Is it over yet? Oh, I can’t bear to look. The suspense is killing me…

Well… it WAS killing me, until I actually peeped through my fingers and saw what was going on. OK, so let me try and figure this out. Parliament just took 13 hours to debate a motion of no confidence in Joseph Muscat’s government… which, by a curious coincidence, is exactly the time it took for the Cuban Missile Crisis to be resolved in 1962 (as a certain film title reminds us)… and at the end of it all, what actually happened? 

From where I’m sitting, it looks a whole lot like nothing at all. A government that went into the vote with the backing of 38 members in the House, emerged from the vote with… well, what do you know? Exactly the same endorsement. And this was all along the only conceivable outcome anyway. All 38 government MPs had made their voting intentions perfectly clear beforehand. Ditto for all 31 Opposition members, including the two independents. 

The rest is simple mathematics… and even I (who have Marie Antoinette’s head for numbers) can work out the answer in a lot less than 13 hours.

Talk about laboriously foreshadowed endings, though. It almost reminds me the most predictable of the lot: ‘Scooby Doo’, the classic 1970s cartoon in which every single episode always ended with the same line: “And I would have gotten away with it, too… if it weren’t for you meddling (and/or pesky) kids…”

Only with a small variation: now, it is a case of: “And I DID get away with it, too…. all thanks to you pesky, meddling kids….”

But let’s look at what emerged from Monday’s marathon session (for so it has been described… even though ordinary marathons are usually run in around one third the time). Certainly, nothing new came out of the discussion itself. At most parts, it was as though each MP was speaking from within a private bubble of his or her own. Anything said before was simply waved aside as irrelevant. 

So whenever Opposition members challenged the government to publish its energy contracts, to take action over Panamagate, etc…. the next government MP would simply talk about whichever area of the government’s three-year record happened to be most convenient. 

For Deborah Schembri and Helena Dalli, it was all the legislation concerning civil rights and equality. For Silvio Parnis, it was things like childcare centres and reduced tariffs for hairdressers. And for pretty much everyone else, it was economic growth and jobs.

Hardly any government speakers even alluded to corruption or to Panama at all. And who can blame them? The topic of the debate had been chosen by the Opposition. And it wasn’t corruption or Panama; it was a vote of confidence in the government.

Automatically, then, any aspect of government activity over the last three years becomes fair game for discussion. In fact, it would have to be discussed: if you’re going to reconfirm or withdraw your approval of the present government, it follows that you have to look closely at what it is you are actually approving or rejecting.

Small wonder the debate itself would turn out to be as eminently predictable as its outcome. The chosen topic afforded Muscat every escape route imaginable. It even allowed Justice Minister Owen Bonnici to amend the motion into one of “approval of the government’s achievements”. Entirely appropriate for a vote of confidence, perhaps; entirely inappropriate, however, if the intention behind the motion was to force the government to take the action it has so far avoided taking.

Makes you wonder why the Opposition even tabled the motion at all. Why give an ‘embattled’ prime minister the opportunity to so easily legitimise his position? For that, ultimately, was the actual outcome. Not only did Muscat ‘survive’ the challenge with ease – as all but the most seriously deluded obviously expected – but he even emerged strengthened as a result. 

It is, of course, an illusion of strength… you and I know this, because we know how things work here. But illusions are powerful things, in a political world ruled primarily by perception. Even if Monday’s debate was all along a travesty, in that there never was any danger of a backbencher to begin with… well, that’s not the impression the rest of the world might have had until that point.

Anyone who read the European Observer last week, for instance, might have expected a sudden Constitutional crisis. They were told that Muscat was ‘embattled’, and that his parliamentary majority was hanging by a thread. 

What would they think now, I wonder? Any talk of a ‘delegitimised government’ is now clearly out of the window. By definition, the legitimacy of a government is determined first by the electorate, and subsequently by the support of parliament. There can be no doubt about the former: Muscat won an election in 2013, and was given a mandate to govern for five years. But as long as there were doubts about the latter, one could conceivably talk of ‘embattlement’ and get away with it. 

That is now history. Muscat’s support has (predictably) been renewed, in no uncertain terms, by Monday’s vote… thanks to an initiative put forward by the Opposition, no less. To argue that he is ‘hanging by a thread’ is clearly to defy the facts as any European observer would actually see them. In fact, about the only thing that has changed as a result of the Parliamentary debate is that Muscat now has a trump card in his hand, which he lacked before. He can now instantly deflect all talk of a ‘political crisis’… and no one who claims to speak on behalf of ‘democratic principles’ can realistically argue otherwise. 

The rules of democracy are roughly the same across Europe; and so far, those rules have all worked to Muscat’s favour. 

Whether they should have or not is, of course, another question. What all this also means is that Muscat has managed, through entirely democratic means, to simply wiggle out of any responsibility for his own government’s actions. And this tells us more about the state of our democracy, than about the state of Muscat’s government.

Let’s be clear on one thing: a parliamentary vote of confidence might not have been such a bad idea, in most other European democracies. If Muscat were the prime minister of another European state, the result might have been very different indeed. 

In the UK, for instance, David Cameron is currently being passed through the shredder on account of a scandal that is only very distantly related to the one that has engulfed Muscat’s government. True, the British prime minister is unlikely to lose his job directly over his father’s undeclared Panamanian bank account. But if it emerges – as it did here – that a senior minister had teamed with own chief of staff to open up companies in the same tax haven, while approaching dozens of overseas banks to open accounts… I reckon we’d already be talking about the Cameron administration in the past tense.

But this only illustrates a peculiarity about Maltese politics that we already knew (and that was in any case spelt out for us by Monday’s ‘debate’). In other democratic traditions, it would be considered normal for a government to lose its majority in Parliament over a corruption scandal. In Malta, this is simply unheard of. Governments have collapsed from time to time, sure they have; but always as a result of a clash of egos… never of corruption. 

On the contrary: when Maltese governments stand accused of corruption, they inevitably close ranks and dig deeper into their political trenches. 

The only other thing that has emerged is the extent of the present government’s immunity to the forces of democracy. Muscat, for instance, repeated his earlier line that ‘inaction is not an option’. Yet to date, it remains the only option he has taken in the past eight weeks. 

Mizzi himself, on the other hand, told us that, with hindsight, the decision to open a company in Panama “wasn’t the best choice”… and (even more pointedly) that he “regrets that the Panama Papers distracted from the government’s successes”. 

The first part is just a slightly less direct way of saying: “with hindsight, I now realise that all my critics are right, and that I really should resign”. The second part points to one of many reasons. Leaving aside ethical considerations, Mizzi should also resign because his poor judgment placed his own government in an embarrassing and potentially ruinous situation. 

That would be considered a resigning matter in most other democracies. Not in Malta, however. Here, we do not even debate ‘resigning matters’ in Parliament. No, we debate the “government’s achievements” instead… and to add a healthy dose of surrealism to the mix, we do so on the insistence of the Opposition.

It fell to Marlene Farrugia to point out the obvious: the PN’s motion entirely missed the wood for the trees. It should all along have been a vote of confidence in Konrad Mizzi, not Muscat. So she presented the correct motion herself, and… who knows? Maybe this time we’ll finally get around to debating the real issue for a change… 

I, for one, will not be holding my breath.