Franco Wants to be party leader, like his old classmate Joseph

Malta Independent Sunday, 8 January 2012, 00:00 Last update: about 14 years ago

Franco wants to be party leader, like his old classmate Joseph

On 29 December, I wrote that Franco Debono’s ultimate goal is not to merely be made a cabinet minister, but to become leader of the Nationalist Party, and that all his actions, thoughts, behaviour and strategy must be considered in this context.

People laughed or shook their heads when they read that, dismissed it as a wild exaggeration, a bit of festive fun. But it wasn’t.

I’d been watching the man for a while and things had suddenly fallen into place. When you look back at the pattern of his behaviour, you’ll see that all his actions – even those ostensibly geared towards the reform of this or that law – have had the sole aim of getting him rewarded with a position in the cabinet. And that position in the cabinet was going to be the means to the ultimate end of becoming party leader, like his old classroom rival, Joseph Muscat.

Debono’s campaign tactics were not particularly noticeable at first and went on mainly behind the scenes, out of the public eye. He would ring people, pester them for meetings, show them his Form IIC report card (I found out about that only recently), browbeat them, ring them at all hours and send annoying text messages.

Then his tactics became increasingly intense (and that’s saying something, given how intense they were already), focussed and public over the last year or two. But as 2011 drew to a close, Franco Debono began manifesting signs of sustained hysteria and panic. His tactics and strategy were formed by the pressure of time running out and a general election drawing near before he had time to achieve his ambition.

By the end of the year he had thrown all caution to the wind and his panic was at its highest level. In the most public and dramatic way possible, he gave the prime minister an ultimatum: create a separate justice ministry or I shall not support you. What he meant, of course, was ‘make me justice minister’. He needed to get into the cabinet and he needed to do it now, before the general election comes up. Why? Because what he really wants is the prime minister’s chair, and the best position from which to negotiate the defenestration of the prime minister, he had worked out, is in the cabinet.

Once in the cabinet, or so he thought in his lost world, he would be able to force a change of leader, citing the need of a fresh young face before the general election, and that fresh young face would be him, just like Joseph. Then it would be him and Joseph, head to head, a fight to the death between two boys whose development seems to have been arrested way back when, though it did nothing to curb their single-minded ambition and self-belief.

Debono’s crisis began in June 2008, when Joseph Muscat pulled off the stunt of becoming Labour leader and leader of the Opposition, without ever having been elected to parliament. This put Debono’s nose severely out of joint, as up until then he had been dining out on the fact that at ‘such a young age’ he had unseated party stalwart Louis Galea. His old classmate, for whom he feels an apparently pathological rivalry, was safely in Brussels. But then that old rival returned and unexpectedly went not just one better than Franco Debono, but wiped the floor with his comparatively meagre achievements.

What was unseating Louis Galea compared to unseating the leader of the Labour Party and becoming leader of the Opposition?

From there on in, there were going to be serious problems, but none of us out here knew what the source of those serious problems was, or even where Debono was headed and why. All of this has become clear in recent weeks, reaching its climactic confirmation the day before yesterday, when Debono demanded that a TVM news crew film his Form IIC midyear report. Why Form IIC midyear in particular? I would imagine that Joseph Muscat knows the answer to that.

Indeed, Muscat’s knowledge of Debono’s personality and weaknesses (many of which, incidentally, he shares, making me wonder what went so badly wrong in that classroom) are a great asset to his own strategy in using them to cause as much trouble as possible for the government.

Now at last I can put that strange Labour Party billboard, which seemed to come out of nowhere and which was followed by no other billboards, into context. By replicating Lawrence Gonzi’s iconic election poster of 2008, but with Franco Debono’s face instead of Gonzi’s, they further fired, and deliberately so, his leadership ambitions. Joseph Muscat must have worked out, correctly as it turns out, that seeing his face on that billboard, where Gonzi’s was in the last election, would make the possibility of the party leadership even more real in his overworked mind.

I mocked that billboard as did so many others who, like me, thought it was a massive miscalculation and a tactic that backfired. But it turns out to have been perfectly targeted, because the sole target was Franco Debono, and it worked. A very troubled man was manipulated successfully. Now the country is left with the very real problem of that troubled man, who genuinely believes he can and should be party leader, all because Joseph Muscat got there first.