Fausto Majistral inaugurates the guest blogging season with the first “zolabyte” or guest post on j’accuse. Here he discusses Gonzi’s cabinet reshuffle.
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Philip Mifsud may not be a well-known Nationalist MP but he’s recently made a point that should have attracted far more attention than much that has been said by other backbenchers seeking the limelight. Speaking about how the PM handled Franco Debono he said it risked being a “precedent” where MPs would “start to subject government and the Prime Minister to blackmail, which is totally unacceptable”.
With a vacancy arising in an important post in a small Cabinet, it was important to watch if the PM would bend and, if he did, which way. He didn’t. In a nutshell: Joe Cassar gets promoted to Minister of Health, to Cristina’s portfolio gets added Social Policy (minus Health), Demarco’s now includes environment and culture, Jason Azzopardi gets also SMEs, coops and trade services and Enemalta and WSC get shifted from Austin Gatt’s watch to Tonio Fenech’s.
So Cabinet stays small and actually gets smaller. More importantly, from a strictly political perspective, is no new faces, no backbenchers mollified.
Objectively, this Cabinet is very new retaining only very few MPs who had previously held a Ministerial post and now one more of them is gone. But of course, it’s the electorate’s perception that counts and the idea that the PM should inject new blood has been doing the rounds: of no less than 65%, a MaltaToday survey informs us.
Should the PM have risked being seen as weak and acted on that general feeling? A second look at the survey’s numbers is worth taking. When it came to mentioning the papabili Robert Arrigo managed a mere 11%. That’s 11% of the 65%, by the way, and we’re not told how many of them hail from the electoral district Arrigo was returned from. As to the “rest” none managed more than 3%. In fact, a good two-thirds who thought there should be new appointees on Cabinet either ticked “don’t know” or “none of the above” when prompted for a name.
As there are no laws prohibiting the abortion of hypothetical frontbenchers yet unborn I will do just that. But before moving on let me recall that in 1995 in the last years of Fenech-Adami II, the erstwhile PM came up with a “jesuitical” solution (the kind of which, amongst other things, lumped us with no less than five national days) and promoted so many backbenchers that he almost ran out of MPs. Fenech-Adami may have spared himself the rumblings right behind him but not the opposition benches only the following year. Political honeymoons with newcomers tend to be very brief.
Fausto Majistral
for J’accuse Zolabytes
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Zolabytes is a new rubrique on J’accuse – the name is a nod to the original J’accuser (Emile Zola) and a building block of the digital age (byte). Zolabytes is intended to be a collection of guest contributions in the spirit of discussion that has been promoted by J’accuse on the online Maltese political scene for 5 years.
Opinions expressed in zolabytes contributions are those of the author in question. Opinions appearing on zolabytes do not necessarily reflect the editorial line of J’accuse the blog.
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