Opinion: Grim farce

Conspiracy theorist-in-chief Robert Abela is working hard.  As events swiftly develop, he adds more pieces to his “establishment” terror story. Abela’s whole narrative is entirely ridiculous, but it’s also disturbingly reckless.

Yet his sycophantic MPs and party officials repeat his dumb story as if it were the height of political insight.

We’ve been here before with Joseph Muscat. He, too, had a pathetic bunch of submissive bootlickers who cheered him on as he meticulously engineered his downfall, dragging the nation down with him.

They shoved each other out of the way to be first to hug Konrad Mizzi after the Panama Papers miraculously exposed his botched attempt to squirrel millions into his secret companies.

They climbed over each other to back Muscat when he deviously shielded his chief of staff, Keith Schembri.

They know how it all ended – Malta on the FATF’s greylist, the Council of Europe demanding a public inquiry on the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia, Chris Cardona and Konrad Mizzi ostracised, and Joseph Muscat ousted and humiliated.

They’ve learned nothing, and as Abela marches towards his own downfall, they’re doing it all over again.

Except this time, it’s a far more dangerous leader at the helm. Abela makes no attempt to conceal his attempts to destroy our democracy.

He does it in the open. He’s taken a hatchet to our institutions, and his party spurs him on as he hacks away at the very pillars of our Republic. He’s even accused the magistrate of “political terrorism”.

In Abela’s paranoid delusions, the magistrate waited for four and a half years specifically to conclude her inquiry on the precise day that would wreak maximum damage to the Labour Party.

And she did it because, being ‘a rabid PN activist’, she executed the orders of ‘the establishment’. Everything in the inquiry is fiction, just lies and fantasies, according to Abela’s predecessor.

Everybody knows who ‘the establishment’ is, Abela insisted, starting to believe his own hallucinations: it’s the journalists, the Church, the PN, University students, Europe, the international media, the Malta Chamber, Repubblika, the Chamber of Advocates, the Malta Union of Bankers, the Institute of Financial Services Practitioners, Malta Institute of Accountants, Malta Institute of Taxation and the Society of Trusts and Estate Practitioners. Even the President herself.

And ‘the establishment’ is evil. It’s cruel. It doesn’t forget, it doesn’t forgive.

‘The establishment’ is preparing to deny the nation its right to vote, and it’s intent on taking away the people’s sovereignty.  ‘The establishment’ is even punishing people of integrity like Chris Fearne, Abela said.

‘The establishment’ is behind everything.  It’s even taking cancer patients to court simply because they’re registered to vote in a social housing building still under construction, which they don’t live in.

Of course, ‘the establishment’ resorts to the courts – it’s the rule of law they use “to justify that they do whatever they like because they feel that they have absolute protection from our judicial system, which gives them the security and peace of mind that they can do whatever they like”.

This ‘establishment’ is so evil that it even wants those who committed serious financial crimes and who defrauded the nation of hundreds of millions to be dragged before the courts because the courts are always on their side.

The ‘establishment’ didn’t dare take poor Joseph Muscat and his Vitals co-accused before the electorate because they knew the electorate would always support Labour.

In fact, the more accusations the ‘establishment’ hurls against any Labour figure, the more votes they’ll get.  See what happened to Konrad. He quadrupled his vote in 2017 after they smeared him with those ‘lies’ in the Panama Papers.

Rosianne Cutajar rode to victory after the ‘establishment’ picked on her just because she’d been pigging out and getting paid for a job she didn’t do and for which she was entirely incompetent. Muscat won a landslide victory after he defended Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri from the ‘establishment’s fangs.

Yes, this would all be hilarious. But it’s our country, our own and our children’s future that is at stake here. There’s nothing remotely funny in a prime minister who’s lost his reason and his cool spewing wacky stories on the eve of an election.

There’s nothing comical about having at the helm a man determined to take us back to the hubris of Labour’s 1980s lawlessness. There’s nothing entertaining about the inflammatory rhetoric of Robert Abela.

No, the magistrate didn’t conclude her inquiry to harm Labour.  If she wanted to do that, she’d have concluded it before the 2022 elections.  The outcome of those elections had a far greater impact on Malta than the election of six Maltese MEPs in a parliament of 720.

Even if the PN won all 6 MEP seats, that would hardly change the dire state the Labour government plunged our country into. The Labour Party would still be haranguing magistrates, persecuting the media, intimidating the Church, and vilifying the opposition.

No, the magistrate didn’t fabricate the contents of those 78 boxes. She’s got better things to do, such as concluding the other 90 inquiries she’s leading.

The experts she commissioned aren’t “so-called experts,” as Labour TV claimed. They weren’t here to drain millions out of Malta’s coffers. Only Labour’s diehards believe such drivel.  Everybody else sees it for what it is: squalid.

Abela has pushed his luck too far. Finally, most are pushing back. University students, academics, banking unions, four different financial services bodies, former chief justice Said Pullicino, the Institute of Journalists, and Aditus are among those who condemned Abela’s despotic assault on the judiciary.

Even President Spiteri Debono chastised Abela for losing his head, commenting that “such behaviour only served to cloud the reasoning faculties,” urging him to let the institutions work.

Abela can be proud of one big achievement – turning everybody against him and making the ‘establishment’ great again. Everybody seems to be part of that ‘establishment’. It seems the only people who are not part of it are Robert Abela, Joseph and Michelle Muscat, Jason Micallef and Manuel Cuschieri.