The powers invested in the Prime Minister of Malta widely overshadow those of the Judiciary, the Ombudsman, the President, Parliament and just about everyone and everything else in the country, and this presents a serious risk to the rule of law.

This was one of the many troubling findings of the Council of Europe Venice Commission’s report on the state of our democracy.

According to the Commission, the Prime Minister has both Parliament and the Judiciary virtually hamstrung: Parliament, being part-time and underpaid, is too weak to exercise sufficient control over the executive branch; while crucial checks and balances are missing when it comes to the Prime Minister's powers of appointments, particularly his influence on judicial appointments.

Now the government may argue until it is blue in the face that it had merely inherited the situation, which is true, and that it has made sufficient steps in the right direction to correct many of the longstanding wrongs identified by the Commission, which is untrue.

But what it did with this inherited situation it found is another matter altogether.

Even if it was simply a question of having inherited a situation, it must be observed that that situation has been exploited to its maximum potential since 2013, as evidenced so many times, for example, by concerted efforts to stifle the results of magisterial inquiries to prevent them from taking place and the legal machinations employed to protect the government, its members and functionaries against prosecution.

Transparency, accountability and meritocracy were the platforms that the current government had been elected upon back in 2013, and by the 2017 general election, those once highly-vaunted ideals had vanished from the electoral lexicon.

They simply mattered no more. They mattered once to unseat a long-sitting incumbent but they were thrown very quickly out the window thereafter. Once that election had been won, those same people who promised that holy electoral trinity set about doing the exact opposite.

First, and still ongoing, was the capture of every institution that is meant to safeguard the state and its citizens’ interests against wayward members, employees and appointees of government from the abuse and leveraging of power.

And perhaps that is exactly why the government continues to capture each and every state institution like so many squares on a Monopoly board; every institution that is meant to protect citizens’ rights and uphold the laws of the land without the intervention of government institutions.

It has already captured those institutions that should have, but never did, investigate the revelations placed on their tables that exposed the misdeeds of those closest to the Prime Minister.

Now it seems that it has captured Parliament itself, with the Speaker of the House seeming to rule out parliamentary questions deemed too uncomfortable for the government to answer.

And making matters even more concerning is the fact that there will soon be a number of positions in the judiciary up for grabs, and which will be appointed by the government.

Perhaps at the time of the writing of the laws that vested such power in the Prime Minister, those erudite legal scholars had assumed that a Prime Minister and his people would always be beyond reproach. They would run the country in good faith and would not seek to so brazenly skim from the public coffers as we have seen so much of in recent years.

Perhaps those checks and balances are missing because the constitutional system is based on trust. But that system collapses once it is led by the untrustworthy, and when a country’s institutions have been politically captured, the rampant abuse of power cannot be controlled.

But hindsight, as they say, is 20/20.