Our Jekyll and Hyde government

There is widespread consensus that human beings are capable of both great beauty and great malevolence. If this aspect of our nature is consistent through time, wouldn’t it be proper to factor that in when establishing a government?

Since government is made up of human beings who are flawed, it is imperative to minimise the harm government can do to humanity by limiting its scope and power. It seems, though, that this idea has been lost to many in our country today.

On the one hand, many love former disgraced Prime Minister Joseph Muscat and incumbent Prime Minister Robert Abela for their militant efforts in bringing about a radical revolution in LGTBQ+ civil rights; fighting for better employment conditions; and extending social benefits. On the other hand, Abela is all in support of legislation that can arguably be considered just a few notches below totalitarian in spirit and that will stifle freedom of speech and the press (in direct violation of the Constitution and EU legislation), appearing unable to control unsupportable growth, crippling not only businesses but also local communities and other organisations with questionable immigration reform. And let’s not even get into his bullying spat with most of our state institutions. Maybe he’s hangry and just needs another relaxing gym workout.

This Jekyll and Hyde government is infuriating even a growing number of Labour loyalists. When it’s good, Robert Abela’s administration is truly spectacular. But its many failures are stacking up.

Are we governed by Dr Jekyll or Mr Hyde? To judge by the adulation reserved for the previous and incumbent Labour administration, as it dispenses billions of euros for what, on the surface, appear to be good causes from a seemingly bottomless state coffer, the nation wants to believe that the emphatic lawyer politician, Robert Abela, has turned his Castille office into a charitable institution.

Yet such is the hostility directed at him from some quarters, not least from within his Cabinet of ministers, that one might also assume that a sinister psychopath had taken up residence at the same Castille office.

As in Robert Louis Stevenson’s story, both men are really two faces of the same political body. Sometimes, it may suit us to laud Robert Abela while, at other times, cursing him for simply looking the other way when corruption scandals became the order of the day and kept on saddling our little country, or simply projecting a make-belief situation of the best of times to be thrown over a fickle and easily-appeased electorate. Most of us project our hopes and fears onto the government, switching from praise to blame as the mood takes us.

In different periods, the popularity ratings of Joseph Muscat and his successor, Robert Abela, soared to the highest levels since records began. Now it suits us to lay all our troubles at his door, albeit stemming from predecessor Muscat’s rotten administrations. Meanwhile, the incumbent government is credited with saving thousands of jobs, giving a shot in the arm to the creative and hospitality industries, incentivising us to go green, and providing relief to first-time homebuyers. All this before he has even delivered his bounty-filled budget with no apparent strings attached. We know that all these measures must have been signed off by the villain before our hero could strut his stuff. So are we naive? Or just fickle? 

No doubt plenty of Maltese would love someone to fire Robert Abela and appoint someone brewing with honesty and integrity in his stead.

We should be careful about what we wish for. A government run by unelected officials might work for other states, but it would not be a sensible way to run this country. At least here, the government doesn’t change merely on the whim of the head of state. How would we like to wake up one morning and find that President Myriam Spiteri Debono has summoned Robert Abela to the Palace?

Good government is mostly a matter of hard choices. It is probably safe to say that the popularity of the present Labour administration will never return to the heights it reached in 2013 and 2022; indeed, it may yet have a long way to go. Robert Abela’s star will doubtless shine brightly for some time to come, but that too will wane once the full impact of the multiple corruption scandals, maladministration, and absence of good governance and accountability is felt.

To date, he has yet to fully address those issues and other crises, despite the concerns raised in the public domain.

Sometimes, it becomes extremely difficult to assess which characteristic actually manifests in a person in the present—Jekyll or Hyde in the context of duality and not necessarily good and evil. It begs the question: Has the now evident—Mr Hyde—now taken over permanently?

Perhaps we are not led by Jekyll and Hyde after all.

Malta right now is neither a horror movie nor a comedy of errors. It’s more like the 1962 British film The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner, a marathon, not a sprint, run by a borstal boy. We will get to the finishing line in the end, but how we respond to crises matters more than anything decided up at Castille.

We, the people, may think we only get to decide once every few years at elections, but in fact, the everyday decisions we make matter more than we think.