Joseph Muscat has been in office as Prime Minister for 22 months.
It is the same number of months that his mentor and predecessor Alfred Sant spent in total as head of government in what was the shortest legislature since Independence;
It is time for some comparisons.
Alfred Sant’s government is by and large remembered for three issues.
The first is the way he won the election, promising the removal of Value Added Tax and then, once elected, replacing it with another form of taxation that led to so much confusion and backlash.
The second is the freezing of Malta’s application to join the European Union, a move that stalled the procedure Malta was following to become an EU member state and which was later to become a national bone of contention that led to a referendum in which the people, in their majority, voted in favour.
The third is the continuous struggle which Dr Sant had to face with former Labour leader and Prime Minister, a situation that became untenable in the second year of Dr Sant’s tenure and which ultimately pushed him to call an early election, which he lost, bringing his government to a premature end.
The first two issues were the main electoral pledges that the Labour Party made before the 1996 election. The people had then voted in their favour, and Dr Sant had maintained his promise. He said he would have removed VAT, and it was removed; he said he would freeze Malta’s application, and he did so. The Mintoff factor was something that could not be foreseen at the time.
Whether one agreed with him or not, in the 22 months he spent in office Alfred Sant delivered the two most important promises the Labour Party had made before the 1996 election.
The same cannot be said for Joseph Muscat.
The two main promises that the Labour Party made before the 2013 election have already been thrown out the window, and there is no way that one could turn back time for them to be implemented.
The first is the building of a new power station within the first two years. A new power station was supposed to have been completed by March 2015. We are two months away from the deadline, but we have known for quite a while that this mission will not materialise in the pre-established time. This promise was the first to be made in the PL’s election campaign and the party made it its principal weapon with which to promote itself as an alternative government.
It will not be achieved, and there are still many doubts on the way forward in the energy sector. A debate on the agreement signed with the Chinese is still to take place in Parliament, there are no concrete signs that anything serious is taking place as we speak at Delimara and the secrecy surrounding the whole issue is worrying indeed. With the price of oil going down dramatically in the past few months it is also pertinent to ask whether such a heavy investment in a gas-fired plant is now even necessary.
The second promise that has also not materialised is the Malta Taghna Lkoll concept. As Opposition Leader, Joseph Muscat had said that people who did not endorse the PL could still work with a PL government, but this idea was immediately put aside once the vote counting process came to an end.
The past 22 months have shown that only those close to Labour can work with Labour. To satisfy this thirst, Dr Muscat has appointed the largest cabinet ever which, in turn, employed the largest staff complement ever to find as many places as possible for the nearest and dearest. Places were created for others simply to have them have a piece of the ever-growing cake.
Unlike Alfred Sant, Joseph Muscat has failed to deliver what he promised.