Prime Minister Robert Abela has been branded by some as being the Prime Minister of U-turns.

While it's not necessarily a bad thing for a leader to change his stances, particularly if based on genuine consultation and understanding what the people need or want, there have been ample instances when the PM appeared to change position largely as a result of indications that he was losing popular support, for convenience rather than conviction.

The Malta Independent on Sunday looked into the main U-Turns that Abela has come to be associated with since he became Prime Minister.

Konrad Mizzi and the OSCE (January 2020)

A proposition made in the early weeks of Abela's leadership of the country was probably the first major U-turn that his administration committed.

On 27 January 2020, the government proposed Konrad Mizzi - who had resigned as a minister just two months prior amid outcry and mass protests - to head Malta's delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

On the same day, the Times of Malta reported that Mizzi had been engaged as a consultant within his old Tourism Ministry on a pay package of around €80,000 per year just two weeks after he resigned.

On the following day, the government withdrew the nomination and said it would be seeking legal advice on the validity of the consultation contract. The contract was later terminated.

"Prime Minister Robert Abela is going to keep showing that this government is giving absolute priority to good governance so that the country is in a position to operate effectively," the government said upon withdrawing the nomination.

Mizzi was unceremoniously booted out of the Labour Party's Parliamentary group six months later. He remained an independent MP until the 2022 general election, when he did not seek re-election.

A marina for Marsaskala (February 2022)

If there is ever a good time to back down on something amid significant public pressure, it would be right before a general election.

And that's exactly what Abela did when it came to a proposal for a yacht marina which would have enveloped Marsaskala Bay. The proposal had initially been made by Transport Malta in August 2021, and would have seen the bay be taken up by a minimum of 700 berths, dredging take place in at least four places, and land be reclaimed in three separate areas totalling up to 16,000 square metres.

The plans were met with outrage and opposition particularly from residents' groups, and then from the locality's Labour-led local council as well. The criticism dragged on for months with several protests and petitions being filed on the matter.

Marsaskala's Labour mayor Mario Calleja told The Malta Independent in an interview in February 2022 that "you really have to be brainless to be in favour of the project as it was proposed".

Two days after the interview was published - and a month before the 2022 general election - the Prime Minister held a political activity in Marsaskala, where he announced that the project had been scrapped.

"We heard the concerns of the people. We listened, and we learned," he said. 

Two years later, the Planning Authority announced that it was moving to withdraw a planning policy supporting the development of a yacht marina in Marsaskala.

The Jean Paul Sofia public inquiry (July 2023)

Robert Abela's U-turn on whether to call a public inquiry into the death of Jean Paul Sofia was perhaps his most public, most notable, and the one which caused most outrage among the public.

Sofia died on 3 December 2022 when he went to deliver tools to a partially constructed factory in the Corradino Industrial Estate. He entered the building, and seven minutes later it collapsed, with the 20-year-old not seen alive again.

What followed was both an outpouring of grief for this completely innocent, young victim - and a sense of anger directed at a construction industry which has long held a perception of being allowed to do as it pleases, largely unchecked.

Perhaps most impactful was Sofia's mother, Isabelle Bonnici, fronting a campaign for a public inquiry which would look into the incident but also into structural deficiencies within the construction industry and its oversight.

Yet Abela consistently spoke against the idea. His angle was that the public inquiry would interfere with the ongoing magisterial inquiry in the case, and he shifted the blame onto the inquiring magistrate for - in his eyes - taking too long to conclude her investigations.

Things came to a head in July 2023 when PL MPs voted down a motion for the setting up of a public inquiry - with Sofia's family watching on despondently in the Strangers' Gallery. The tides had, by now, very firmly shifted against Abela.

A vigil, planned to take place days later on the doorsteps of Abela's office at Castille, and with thousands expected to attend, the Prime Minister eventually relented. Just five days after he and his MPs voted against a public inquiry, Abela announced that a public inquiry would take place.

The public inquiry went on to declare the tragedy as a "slap in the face" to good governance and exposed various shortcomings within the construction industry.

It remains remembered as Abela's most significant political U-turn.

Malta, the EU, and defence spending (February-March 2025)

This one was a drawn out case. It began in the run-up to the European Parliament elections in 2024, when Abela responded to a policy stance by the Nationalist Party that the European Union needed to invest more in its defence by saying that the PN were effectively warmongers.

The Prime Minister went so far as saying that "populists" within the PN's European political family, the EPP, want to send people's children abroad "to fight other people's wars".

In February 2025, though, Abela said that he would like to see a discussion on whether Malta's constitutional neutrality reflects on the country's defensive needs. He said that Malta wouldn't be fighting anyone's wars, but also admitted that Malta has not done enough on defence.

The PN at that point accused Abela of having committed a U-turn and of extolling what the PN had essentially maintained during the European Parliament election campaign.

A month later, Abela attended a European Council special meeting to discuss Europe's support for Ukraine and an €800 billion plan to boost the EU's defence industry, and in the run-up he said that the EU needed to adopt Malta's "peace first" principle and that increasing military spending will not end the war between Ukraine and Russia.

An increase in military funding "will possibly escalate tensions", Abela said, adding: "I categorically exclude that our country will be participating... in spending money on weapons."

That night, however, Abela was part of the group of 26 EU leaders who gave the green light to the "re-arm Europe" programme to increase defence spending.

In a statement following the decision, the PN summed it up: "Abela has once again done what he is well known for - another U-turn, or rather a complete 360-degree turn, leaving Malta without direction."

Abela justified the decision by saying he would not block EU arms spending as long as Malta's neutrality remains respected.

Reforming the European Convention on Human Rights (March-May 2025)

Abela caused a bit of a stir last March when he said in Parliament that certain human rights conventions needed to be reformed in order to reflect today's realities, particularly on migration.

This was after he commented that Malta would be putting reforming the European Human Rights Convention on the agenda for its upcoming Council of Europe presidency.

The comments appeared to refer to two main sources of irritation: a European court decision stopping Italy from moving asylum seekers to Albania while their claims are being processed, and problems in deporting migrants who have committed a crime in Malta.

But they drew condemnation in some circles: NGOs said that Abela was pandering to the far-right and called the idea "disturbing" while others sought clarity over what exactly Abela was proposing.

Come May, however, when Malta took on the Council of Europe presidency there was no mention of the idea whatsoever by Foreign Affairs Minister Ian Borg when he spoke to the CoE's Committee of Ministers and outlined Malta's agenda.

There hasn't been any mention of the idea since, too.

Manoel Island (June 2025)

The campaign for Manoel Island to be saved from development can be traced back long before 2025, but a petition launched in March last year calling for the area to be turned into a national park clawed its way into national relevance within a matter of weeks.

Abela's stance on Manoel Island underwent a significant change within a span of just over 12 months. In March 2024, he said that the contractual obligations on Manoel Island were clear, and that the project that was proposed was "a project of the highest quality". Just over a year later, he said that taking the land back would not be feasible, and wouldn't make financial sense.

He later criticised the ongoing narrative at the time as "selective", noting that the revised master plan by MIDI focuses on heritage preservation and significantly reduces the development footprint and then attacked the PN administration which granted the concession.

Here, however, he said that the government would be analysing the concession to ensure that the contractual obligations were being fulfilled. In June 2025, he met the people behind the petition to turn Manoel Island into a national park, and it seemed that he had been swayed: "I told the petitioners that their fight is my fight... This is a cause I greatly believe in," he said.

The day didn't even end until MIDI issued a company announcement saying it was ready to sit down with the government to reach a solution where the land would be given back to the state.

Bills 143 and 144 (July-August 2025)

It's an age-old tactic for the government to try and use the calm of summer, when minds are more relaxed and more focused on holidays than on politics, to try and push through something a bit more contentious than usual.

This is exactly what the Labour government tried to do last summer, as Parliament dragged on without a summer recess for the longest time since 1987.

The government filed a motion to reform Malta's planning laws in July 2025, with the projected reforms being wide-ranging and of major impact to the planning landscape.

Bills 143 and 144 were tabled with no public consultation and little consultation with sectoral entities - the only stakeholders consulted, the government later admitted, was the Malta Developers' Association and the Chamber of Architects.

The bills were described as a "developers' wishlist" by NGOs - and with good reason: they proposed things such as removing the court's authority to revoke a planning permit, allow the Planning Authority to amend local plans at will, and restrict how appeals can be filed.

Protests followed until the government eventually relented from its initial intention to rush the bills through Parliament and opened them up for public consultation.

Since then, Abela has admitted that the reform had gone beyond what it should have been, saying that there were certain parts of it which should be removed.

What the outcome of the consultation will be remains to be seen.

How to end the Ukraine war (September 2025)

Also defence related was Abela's stance on the war in Ukraine in 2025.

"I am not asking Ukraine to renounce itself and declare a defeat, but we cannot say that Ukraine should win at all costs either," Abela said in March 2025 when attending a European Council summit to discuss increased defence spending.

"Ukraine will not win this war," he said a couple of days later in an interview on party media. A week prior - around the time of the summit - he said that the Ukraine war could not be ended without "compromises".

He had avoided specifying exactly what form these "compromises" should take, but the biggest bone of contention when it comes to seeking peace has been territorial in nature: Russia continues to illegally occupy swathes of Ukrainian land.

It was therefore somewhat surprising, considering his remarks in March 2025, when in September 2025 Abela insisted that the return of all Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia to Ukraine is a non-negotiable.

This includes Crimea, which has been illegally annexed by the Russians since 2014.

Abela was addressing an event hosted by Ukraine at the United Nations in New York City, and he argued that restoring Ukraine's borders was not only essential for the country, but was also a crucial step towards establishing a lasting peace.

The PN seized upon this change of stance and said "with astonishment" that this was "yet another case of a Prime Minister who shifts with every wind, attempting to portray himself as a statesman when his actions have only revealed a lack of direction and seriousness".

Malta and Donald Trump's Board of Peace (January-February)

Another recent addition to this list was born from an off-the-cuff answer that Abela gave after a ministerial statement last month, where he said that Malta had been "informally invited" to US President Donald Trump's Board of Peace.

The Board of Peace has been largely shunned by Western powers, with Bulgaria being the only European Union member state to join, and entry comes with an apparent price tag of $1 billion.

"We have an informal invitation to participate in this Board of Peace, and it is being evaluated," Abela told Parliament. He framed the decision strictly in terms of Maltese interests, saying that "if the final evaluation is that it is in the best interest of Malta, we will join... even if the EU takes a position against joining".

But what followed was concern and a degree of opposition to the fact that Malta would even consider joining such a board fronted by a US administration which has been diplomatically hostile towards the European Union and some of its member states.

Abela's stance attracted critique from within his own party: backbenchers Edward Zammit Lewis and Roderick Galdes, together with PL president Alex Sciberras, all expressed scepticism at the prospect.

A week after his remarks, Abela admitted that the board's format today "is not ideal", but said that change can only be achieved by being at the table.

Meanwhile, this past week the Permanent Secretary for the Ministry for Foreign Affairs Christopher Cutajar told a Parliamentary committee that Malta had not received a formal invitation to the body.

Storm Harry compensation (January-February)

The last - so far - U-turn committed concerns compensation which the government is set to offer to businesses which suffered damages as a result of Storm Harry, which battered Malta with winds of over 100 km/h last month.

Seaside areas especially in Marsaskala and Ghar Lapsi were particularly heavily affected by the storm, leading the government to announce that it would be opening a €1 million fund to compensate for damage to private property caused by the storm where losses are not covered by insurance.

Concerns were raised, though, that the fund may be used to compensate for damages sustained to structures and elements which had been placed illegally and without planning permission. The Prime Minister however, at least initially, said that businesses, which have illegal structures, will still be eligible to receive financial assistance from the fund.

Speaking to journalists on 3 February, Abela explained that compliance with planning laws would be treated separately from emergency assistance. He said the government was willing to help all affected businesses when livelihoods were at stake.

But criticism began to then mount: the Chamber of Commerce, the NGO Repubblika, the parties Momentum and ADPD, several residents' groups, and former Labour leader and Prime Minister Alfred Sant all joined a chorus of opposition to the Prime Minister's stance.

Sure enough, two days after making his initial remark, Abela backtracked and said that businesses which have had illegal structures damaged by Storm Harry will not be eligible for full government compensation unless those illegalities are regularised with the Planning Authority within a year.