Malta should never have found itself in the absurd position of extending the terms of two of the country's highest constitutional office holders simply because the political class failed to do its job on time.

Yet that is precisely where we are.

Last Wednesday, Parliament unanimously agreed to prolong the appointment of Auditor General Charles Deguara because no agreement has been reached on his successor. Weeks earlier, the same had already happened in the case of the Chief Justice, with Chief Justice Mark Chetcuti remaining in office beyond the normal retirement point because government and Opposition could not agree on who should take over.

These are not minor administrative delays. They concern two of the most sensitive and important institutional posts in the country. That the country has drifted into this state of uncertainty is a damning indictment of both sides of the House - but above all of the government, which carries the greater burden of responsibility and has plainly failed to lead.

Key appointments have been allowed to become political battlegrounds, and in the Chief Justice saga in particular, the process degenerated into a spectacle unworthy of a mature democracy. Names were floated and discarded in public, parliamentary motions were tabled despite being clearly destined to fail, and the extraordinary intervention of a sitting judge underlined just how serious and unhealthy the situation had become.

In constitutional matters, leadership must come from the administration of the day. It is the government that has the responsibility to anticipate problems, initiate talks in good time, build consensus where consensus is required, and if necessary propose reforms long before a deadline is looming.

Robert Abela's administration did none of this with sufficient urgency. It allowed the country to edge closer and closer to a constitutional cliff, and only when the crisis was already upon us did it begin scrambling for an "anti-deadlock mechanism".

This is not governance. It is crisis management of the worst kind - reactive, improvised and entirely avoidable.

The system that is now being discussed should have been in place long before these appointments approached expiry. That is the real scandal. The government knew the constitutional requirements. It knew that a two-thirds majority would be needed. It knew that relations with the Opposition were poor and that agreement could not be taken for granted. And yet it still failed to foresee the obvious difficulties.

The Chief Justice case makes the failure even more glaring. The Venice Commission had already warned that the appointment of the Chief Justice should not remain in the hands of the political class. Its recommendations were clear: the process should be insulated from partisan manoeuvring, precisely to prevent what Malta is now witnessing - the highest judicial office in the land turned into a political football.

The government chose not to heed that advice.

Instead of acting when the warnings were there, it allowed the defective system to remain in place until the defect exploded into a full-blown institutional problem. It is therefore difficult to take seriously the government's current attempts to portray itself as the architect of a solution. It is, in large measure, the architect of the crisis.

Malta deserves better than a political class that waits until the eleventh hour before confronting obvious constitutional flaws. Appointments of this magnitude cannot be left hanging until terms expire and emergency extensions become the only escape route.

This episode should be a turning point. A durable anti-deadlock mechanism must be introduced, and the method of appointing the Chief Justice and Auditor General must be removed from day-to-day political bargaining. But just as important, a culture must be created in which institutional continuity is planned, not improvised.

The damage has already been done. What remains to be seen is whether the country's leaders have learned anything at all.