At the end of this momentuous week, one finds oneself still mystified.

If the choice of Dr George Abela as Malta’s next President is all that positive, why then all the mystery surrounding its announcement?

If, on the one hand, all this Byzantine concoction of organized consensus is required by the state of Maltese politics, then we must be in a very dire state indeed.

If, second hypothesis, all this did not happen by design but rather because some people used their insider knowledge to pre-empt matters, then we are in an even worse state.

Let us register the facts we know and map out what is still unknown.

Fact 1: All last Sunday’s papers, bar this one and Il-Mument, led by the story that Dr Abela had been proposed by the Prime Minister and accepted by the Leader of the Opposition as the next President.

The first to come out with the story were The Times website and PBS News on Saturday evening. The Times even changed the title and thrust of the story within seconds of posting it there.

When confronted by several MPs during Monday’s Nationalist Party parliamentary group meeting, Dr Gonzi strongly denied he or his office had any hand in leaking the story. This tallies with what people from OPM have been saying all through last week – that they had nothing to do with spinning the story.

Not all MPs believed him then or believe him now, this paper can confirm. Some of those who believed him were persuaded by his body language that he was saying the truth and not evading the issue.

Others believed him because they understood that not to believe their own party leader, in such a fragile time when the party has a majority of just one in the House, would be tantamount to a vote of no confidence.

It was for this reason, in other words, so as not to believe the contrary, that many within the parliamentary group and within the party itself began to believe that the leak ‘must’ have come from the Labour Party, or at least from sections of the Labour Party not connected to Joseph Muscat, or from disgruntled sections inside Labour out to create mischief at the parliamentary group meeting on Monday. The top levels of the Nationalist Party, despite all talk of national reconciliation, still hold fast to this belief and express it quite openly.

Or, another alternative, that the leak came from the group around George Abela out to pre-empt the meetings of the two parliamentary groups and seal the issue through mutually reinforcing beliefs that the deal was sealed and a fait accompli.

In other words, one was led to believe the leaks came from the group surrounding the new white hope as the only alternative to this is to believe the leak came from the very top of government.

Not having been part of the privileged elite to get the leak (thus confirming, if need be, that this paper is not for sale to the highest bidder) we cannot say where did the leak sprang from.

However, one paper which had the leak, MaltaToday, stated in its weekly edition that the leak came from OPM (JPO, Alfred Sant dissent on Abela) and this has not been denied so far.

Fact 2: The two parliamentary groups, meeting on Monday, were presented by what was in essence a fait accompli which was so strong it bounced from one to the other and reinforced itself.

Now that, with hind-sight, looks like the whole objective of the media storm on Sunday. To put it in simple terms: had the whole thing been kept quiet (rather difficult to do in Malta) the two parliamentary groups would have had a better opportunity to reject the proposal or to discuss it in all its aspects.

As it was, the Prime Minister had suggested the name on 29 December, Dr Muscat kept it under his hat for many days and it was only on Friday, 9 January, that he signified his consent. There are even people who seem to have glimpsed Dr Muscat telling Dr Abela about his consent at the LP party for the media on Friday 9.

Did Dr Gonzi have enough motivation to get the name leaked in the media so as to hurry things up and not let a spanner in the works? Of course he had. Did Dr Muscat have enough motivation to hurry up and spin the news in the media so as to seal the deal? Of course he had. Did Dr Abela’s group have enough motivation to hurry up and break the news so as to commit the two sides? Of course it had.

Was it right the two parliamentary groups were put under all this media pressure to approve the deal when one is basically dealing with people aiming to serve the public the best way they could? If a football team committee were put under similar pressure all hell would break loose. As one, reportedly a key minister, was said to have told Dr Gonzi to his face on Monday, “At the end, you are the Prime Minister and the choice is yours, but when one finds the issue is about to break out in public, one should get the parliamentary group to meet before that happens, at short notice”. In other words, next time, try to do better.

There were some absentees on Monday on the PN side (and also on Labour). Inside the PN meeting there was much muttering ‘This is a scandal. Why go against it when it’s all decided?’ People still aspire to become ministers at the next reshuffle. Few or none would be so foolhardy as to absent themselves when the vote in Parliament comes up. The power of patronage enjoyed by the prime minister is enormous.

And even those whose names became public knowledge as those who questioned Dr Abela’s nomination, Simon Busuttil and Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, were not the only ones to have spoken and disagreed, and quite aghast only they had been identified.

It must be made clear that, against the practice in the Labour parliamentary group, the PN parliamentary group never votes (except to choose the 13 members on the national executive) but the non-holding of a vote was then misconstrued as reinforcing the idea that Dr Abela’s nomination was carried by the PN group with no vote being taken.

It must also be made clear that the discussion, again inside the PN parliamentary group, was solely on the political level, rather than on the personal level. At the personal level, Dr Abela is more than welcome to the PN parliamentary group.

Where some differed was on the political level. The MPs’ contacts with their power base had shown some of them the anger expressed by many hard-core PN supporters who disagreed with the choice of a Labourite, any Labourite, during the party’s term of office. Do we have a guarantee that an LP administration would choose a PN member for President, some asked. Others pointed out that the choice of Dr Abela as ‘the tame Labourite’ continues the process of making Labour with Dr Abela and Dr Muscat palatable once again to the Maltese electorate.

Other PN MPs, to be fair, said they found an overwhelming majority among the PN supporters they met over the week in favour of Dr Abela (though it will only be today when they meet the hard core at the kazini).

Some doubt whether the prime minister’s initiative would fool the other side. During the Labour leadership battle, it was quite evident that Dr Abela was being pushed by Nationalist opinion leaders, papers etc. The LP delegates rejected this pressure, thus showing what they thought of the public pressure. In choosing Dr Abela now as the next Head of State, even with LP backing, LP core supporters would be in no way taken in by such a transparent ruse, it is being argued.

The reaction inside the LP parliamentary group seems to have been quite stormy but at the end only Dr Alfred Sant and Dr George Vella voted against and another MP abstained.

That personal ties between these two and Dr Abela have been broken off since those stormy days in July 1998 is well-known, and it is common knowledge that Dr Sant’s power of incumbency acted against Dr Abela in this year’s leadership race. Dr Vella, once a fellow deputy leader with Dr Abela, has flatly contradicted him on a matter of record as to what went on in 1998. When they chose Dr Muscat over Dr Abela the LP delegates were expressing, true, their support of young Dr Muscat, but they were also voting against Dr Abela and all he signified. They never forgave him for absenting himself from the party’s core before the 1998 defeat and since then, and for undermining Dr Sant’s position time and again. And then there was all that business with the General Workers Union …

For the Labour rank and file, having Dr Abela as President hardly counts as having ‘their own man’ in such a position for loyalty, in any Maltese party, is all-important. If Dr Gonzi felt that by appointing Dr Abela as President he was in any way seeking rapprochement with the Opposition, he is well mistaken. The reply came from Dr Muscat on that same Saturday morning: Labour intends to continue its confrontation with the government on the pairing issue in Parliament.

Having said that, it was rather surprising that the LP parliamentary group on Monday ended up by approving the choice, except for the two negative votes and an abstention. It was also rather surprising that Dr Muscat did not seek to delay approval – or perhaps he did, all the way between 29 December and 9 January until he could delay no longer and gave his assent.

Let’s put it this way: imagine things were different and Labour won the last election and the Labour leader and prime minister chose a person within the Nationalist ranks but rather considered by the rank and file as not well-looked upon by the party leaders. Let’s say, just for hypothesis’ sake, that the Labour leader chooses Dr Frank Portelli. Would the Nationalist Leader of the Opposition have accepted this nomination?

Fact 3: The choice of Dr Abela has been greeted by most sectors of the population. Even before he is nominated, Dr Abela has been quite popular, and not just in the political sphere. On the personal level he comes across as honest, humble, hard-working and, important and rare in a politician, he can laugh at himself. He was a success as the head of the MFA (though his record has been muddied by that 12-1 defeat by Spain – ask the Dutch).

Even though he was the GWU legal counsel all through the years when GWU was in the Labour Cabinet, there is nothing to tie him in with the malpractices of the time (there is however a rather funny photo of him nose to nose with a police officer during the MIA troubles in 1999).

Over the past week, he has been presented to the people as the ‘right’ choice.

Some of the comments made seem to say that just by picking somebody from the opposite camp was a masterstroke by Dr Gonzi. As Peter Serracino Inglott pointed out, such a comment would seem to downgrade all preceding Presidents because they happened to be chosen by their own party rather than by the opposite party, when they upheld the honour of their post with dignity and responsibility.

It is true that the confrontations of the past months and years had led the country, this time last year, to very nearly a traumatic split down the middle and that better relations between the majority and the minority, when the distance between them turned out to be so narrow, is in the national interest.

But choosing a President from among the ranks of the party in Opposition does not, ipso facto, solve this if this is not preceded and accompanied by a new spirit and understanding of the rules of democracy both on the government side and on the opposition side. Will the present government curbs its frequent tendency to ride roughshod over any opposition and the Opposition? On the contrary, coming from the opposite side gives this President less leverage than someone from this side would have had. Nor does it give this President better leverage with his own party, as has been evident in the past years.

Other comments that have been made seem to say that Dr Abela’s past as a dissenter within his own party is the best guarantee of a successful presidency. But this kind of success has not been all that automatic: on the contrary this is the only case we know where a past dissenter, just like Vaclav Havel, becomes a President.

It is true that the history of dissent in Maltese politics is a rather sad one, where most dissenters ended up on the sidelines or lost out completely. It is a very telling comment about the recent past in Maltese political history that the man who won the 1992 leadership battle in the Labour Party and the 1996 general election, and lost the successive three elections and the EU referendum has now been eclipsed by the man who dissented with him. No wonder Dr Sant voted against!

Yet in his new post as President, Dr Abela will need far more than his past dissent to steer the ship of State over the coming months and years. The euphoria and great hopes which surrounded his choice, apart from the shabbiness with which the media and the parliamentary groups were subjected to, will one day die down. One hopes, and believes, that Dr Abela has it within him to become the focus of national unity and to foster national reconciliation.

As a dissenter with a past, he should be the first to realize that among those who will vote for his nomination there are those who sow the seeds of dissent and polarization but also those who may be the ones to build the strong walls of national reconciliation.

He will learn that it is rather easy to become a dissenter, provided one has the guts, but it is far, far more difficult to steer the ship of State. Good luck, Dr Abela: you’ll need it.