It has now been 100 days since Robert Abela's Labour Party was elected to power for a historic fourth consecutive term - and those hoping that this early period of the legislature was going to be quiet have been left sorely disappointed.

Abela set him and his colleagues a strong target of reforms to be introduced in his first 100 days in power - and with the clock now up on that period, one can make an early assessment: have those promises been fulfilled in time?

Beyond these reforms though, what issues have characterised these first 100 days of the new legislature?

The jury trial against Yorgen Fenech has dominated the headlines for over half of this period, and Fenech's acquittal by a near unanimous jury vote means that this is a matter which will dominate even the next 100 days and beyond.

Couple that with more planning controversies, and more power cuts - these last months have been anything but uneventful.

The Malta Independent on Sunday dives deep into Abela's first 100 days since cruising to a fourth electoral victory.

Abela's seven promised reforms in 100 days

Since his re-election, Abela outlined seven pledges for the first 100 days of his new administration.

These pledges were new reforms to IVF laws, constitutional protection for disabled people, legislation on personal autonomy and the protection of vulnerable adults, legal safeguards for parks and open spaces, changes to planning appeal rules, a reduction of bureaucracy for voluntary organisations, and reforms to strengthen civil rights and that will ensure that reforms since 2013 cannot be reversed.

Without a doubt the most potentially controversial of those is the proposed planning reform.

It was perhaps one of the most controversial topics of the latter end of the last legislature - the idea of not allowing works to start on construction projects while they are under appeal was packaged into a more wide-reaching package of planning reforms that the government tried, in vain, to sneak through Parliament just before a summer recess.

The reform had been described by activists as a "developers' wishlist" and was eventually shelved for public consultation and not touched again at any time before the general election.

After the election, though, the reform was resurrected.

This time, though, the reform has been shorn of the elements which made it so controversial in the first instance. Abela said in an interview in July that the reform will introduce three major changes: that construction work would not be allowed to begin until all appeals - including those before the court - are concluded, that appeal processes will be subject to shorter and fixed deadlines, and that developers will be refunded their expenses if a permit issued by the PA is then overturned by the Environment and Planning Review Tribunal.

These proposals, although not yet formally tabled in Parliament, have proven to be considerably less controversial than their predecessors.

On the topic of IVF, the government announced on 25 July that, as promised, it had expanded the list of genetic conditions eligible for Preimplantation Genetic Testing for Monogenic Disorders by adding 17 additional conditions.

Constitutional protection for people with disability was voted through Parliament unanimously on 22 July, and two laws granting greater autonomy to people with disabilities and strengthening safeguards for vulnerable adults came into effect on 17 July.

On legal safeguards for parks and open spaces, the government announced on 29 July that the White Rocks complex was being designated as a national park through a legal notice and said that this was part of the promised commitment - but a more overarching legal safeguard is yet to be passed.

Meanwhile, a bill aimed at strengthening the legislative framework governing the voluntary sector was tabled for the first reading on 25 June but had not been discussed in Parliament prior to the summer recess.

The remaining pledge was to introduce reforms to strengthen civil rights, particularly through the creation of a National Human Rights and Equality Commission. The government did table a bill to this end - one which required approval from both sides of the House as it was changing the Constitution.

However it soon became clear that - much like in the initial phases of the planning reform - consultation had been lacking. Many organisations such as social partners, human rights groups, trade unions, Church schools and professional bodies all wanted more time and better consultation to discuss the reforms, but the government tried to push the bill through Parliament anyway.

It ended up stalling regardless: the Nationalist Party walked out of Parliament when the time came to vote, meaning that the bill did not achieve the necessary two-thirds majority to become law. It remains on Parliament's agenda.

Something else that the government introduced within its first 100 days catered to the consequences that are brought about by the summer - specifically, the peak summer tourist season.

Each summer, the government is awash with complaints particularly from residents who live in known touristic hotspots. Be it due to noise, disturbances, littering, indecency: the fact is that what was Malta's golden cash cow has started to become a blot on its proverbial copybook.

It was a big step forward however when Home Affairs Minister Glenn Bedingfield announced that he had signed into law a legal notice which allowed police to administer fines on the spot for those breaching the country's laws - fines which must be paid on the spot too.

A few weeks later, the same minister announced that some fines were being increased in order to be more reflective of reality, and it's been clear that there has been a clampdown on unruly behaviour particularly in these touristic hotspots: within four weeks of the fines coming into law, almost 500 of them had been issued.

Such has been the clampdown that - whether people liked it or not - the Armed Forces were deployed to Swieqi to help deal with enforcement in residential areas.

The government will be the first to admit that there is still work to be done in this sector, but the first 100 days have proven to be a significant step forward.

The trial of the century

Without a doubt though, reforms or not, the first 100 days of the new legislature have been entirely overshadowed by the jury trial of Yorgen Fenech over the murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.

The trial, which is the most important one this century - if not in Malta's legal history - has dominated the headlines for the last two months.

Fenech's acquittal of all charges with an 8-1 jury majority means that this is a subject which will continue to dominate the headlines for the weeks and months to come.

It isn't a trial that has particularly placed the government in good light: the close relationship that Fenech - one of Malta's foremost businessmen - had with higher-ups in the Labour government was laid bare for all to see.

Fenech's trial returned to events, meetings, communications and relationships involving people who operated from or had access to the Prime Minister's Office when Joseph Muscat was still in power. It also exposed communication between Fenech and high-ranking police officials and government CEOs.

Seeing the jurors be led into Castille, which houses the Office of the Prime Minister, in Valletta during the trial was a surreal moment: it is a rare if not unprecedented site to see jurors in a murder trial - no less one concerning the assassination of a journalist - led through the offices of the country's premier.

Such was the image that the situation presented, that the Prime Minister's office issued a statement on the matter stipulating that jurors had been shown the office of the chief of staff and that the government is "completely extraneous" to the facts being discussed before the court during the trial.

But the jury's verdict on Wednesday evening is what truly sent shockwaves around the country - and the shockwaves directly implicate Castille.

The jury found Yorgen Fenech not guilty when Fenech's defence was essentially that the real murder mastermind was Keith Schembri - the chief of staff of the then Labour Prime Minister - and that the Labour-led State covered it up.

The verdict places the Labour political establishment - and Schembri in particular - under more scrutiny than ever before.  It places the country's investigative authorities under more pressure to act. It poses questions that will be extremely uncomfortable for the government to answer. It once again throws the whole country into the international spotlight - and not for good reasons.

It is a part of Joseph Muscat's dark legacy that Abela continues to have to grapple with. Abela's critics argue that it is indeed the real reason that he called a general election almost a year early. Only Abela himself can know, deep down, whether that is truly the case or not.

Planning controversies: Manoel Island and Comino

This disposition towards quick planning reform did not, however, stop planning being a major bone of contention in these first 100 days.

The first such bone actually started before the general election when activists noticed that several padel courts were being built illegally on Manoel Island - land which the government bought back to turn into a national park

In May, the Planning Authority's Development and Management Directorate recommended the sanctioning of the courts against a paltry €900 fine - even though 20 courts had, by that point, been illegally built.

The decision on the sanctioning was set to be taken before the election, but was deferred to July after the applicant - Gzira United FC president Sharlon Pace - said his lawyer could not attend. The courts were sanctioned against a fine of €900, which the board chairman himself branded as "ridiculous", and a planning gain of €25,000.

NGOs have since appealed the decision, saying that the Planning Authority had wrongly applied sanctioning regulations.

The Prime Minister had somewhat sidestepped the debate before the election, saying that while he was "categorically against" illegal development, the final decision was in the hands of the PA.

After the PA did make a decision, Abela again said that he did not agree with the fact that the works had started before the permits were issued - but also disagreed that the football club doing the development had no legal position on the land, as the same land had hosted a sports ground for many years.

His Lands Minister, Owen Bonnici, meanwhile told journalists on the same day that he agreed with the sanctioning and that the project was in the same spot of the Nicholl Ground, which Gzira had used for many years.

However, that hasn't been the unilateral position: critics of the government and the decision have said that it does not bode well that one of the first things to happen on Manoel Island since the government took it over to become a national park is the sanctioning of an illegally developed padel complex.

It's an opinion which once again shows the greater public's distrust towards the government when it comes to the environment. Abela will have his work cut-out to change that opinion.

The saga which played out in Comino following the padel courts controversy will not have helped the public's perceptions of the government's environmental credentials either.

This controversy stemmed from a decision by the Environment & Resources Authority to issue an environmental permit for the removal of hundreds of trees and shrubs from a site in Comino where a hotel will be built by developers HV Hospitality.

NGOs had warned that the authority was set to approve the removal of around 800 trees from the Comino nature reserve to facilitate the construction of a 71-room hotel, 16 villas and 44 swimming pools. In actual fact, 678 trees and shrubs - most of which unprotected - are to be removed, and the ERA said that the developers will have an obligation to plant 540 new indigenous trees on the island to make up for the protected trees that will be removed.

The real controversy though is that this environmental permit was approved despite the fact that the approval of the Comino hotel project as a whole is currently under appeal.

Abela and his government have stayed quiet about this issue, and it has perhaps not escalated further because the project developers seem to have opted not to start any works, even though the environmental permit is in hand.

Should that change, though, this is a spark which may ignite a renewed flame of pro-environment action by activists.

Lights out, again

Another summer, another heat wave, another legislature, yet the same issues plagued Malta's electricity supply in these first weeks of the new legislature.

The country sweated through a record-setting heat wave in July - and tens of thousands were left to literally sweat through it as power cuts were reported across the whole country. Practically no locality was left untouched over the course of the better part of a week.

It was a mirror image of an enormous spate of power cuts which the Maltese islands suffered through a couple of years prior, also as Malta faced a heat wave. The government rolled out what it described as a big investment plan to bring the country's electricity distribution system up to scratch - but despite the investment, the country ended up back at square one.

Worse still, Enemalta's senior officials admitted that they had been surprised by the record power demand that there was and that the distribution system ultimately could not keep up with. Another heat wave last week resulted in lengthy power cuts affecting almost all of Gozo as well.

This is a problem that the Labour government can scarcely afford to have drag on, summer after summer.