It has become fashionable to hail our President as the only one who managed to ‘unite’ the country. George Abela is credited with being the first to accomplish the ultimate Maltese mission impossible: garnering support from both sides of the political divide.

Out of fairness to recent history, particularly to the few who made it, I wish to make a dispassionate assessment of this phenomenon.

Let me put my cards on the table. I was, and am, a fan.

The first time I went to a Labour Party event without my journalist’s hat was at Birgu seafront for the launch of Abela’s leadership bid. I told him then – and he has repeated it in public – that it was the first time I felt completely at home at a PL gathering.

I caught a glimpse of a Malta in which the next election might change a government, not threaten people or common decency. Since he took presidential office I have met him about matters small and matters not so small.

It is, therefore, with a clear conscience that I set about the task at hand. Above all, what I have to say is not about Abela, but about those who are, at best, wilfully rewriting history.

Since 1987, the PL has dishonourably objected to every president nominated by the PN government.

It started off with the boycotting of Ċensu Tabone’s public functions after 1989. And it ended in 2004 with Alfred Sant leading his MPs all decked out in funereal black ties and dresses into Parliament on the day Eddie Fenech Adami was voted in as president.

Labour treated Ugo Mifsud Bonnici and Guido de Marco’s presidential elections with similar, if less virulent, unstateliness.

This is the bleak backdrop of Abela’s unprecedented national acclaim. The four PN politicians who ascended to the presidency were all men who brought honour, stature and wisdom to the office.

In Fenech Adami’s case, as I wrote on his appointment, the office was actually beneath him.

It was certainly not through any fault of their own that these men had a harder time bringing the entire nation on board. It was the PL’s disgraceful inability to have a sense of state which systematically mucked things up for them.

That each of these four men, despite Labour’s nefarious efforts, eventually attracted the support of all men of goodwill only served to elevate their stature even more.

I can already hear the knee-jerk retort: Ah, but these four men were tainted with politics – imċappsa is the word I can’t find a precise translation for. Abela, they add, was not.

That the latter worked with the Electoral Commission which gerrymandered the 1981 election, was prime minister Alfred Sant’s consultant before he fell from grace, worked for decades in the rumbling bowels of the GWU, and more recently came out of a bruising battle for the PL leadership is not the point at all.

On the contrary, democratic politics is combative by nature. But more to the point, a political heart which does not allow time to heal wounds produces nothing but dark ill-will and even darker politics.

What is truly insulting is the shallow implication that having been in politics erodes a president’s potential for national acclaim.

Is there anyone out there who thinks Fenech Adami was less deserving of presidential acclaim because he took this country from Tal-Barrani to Brussels? Because if so, you belong in Alice in Wonderland’s topsy-turvy world, not European Malta.

Secondly, Abela did not supernaturally descend into the Presidential Palace from some celestial chamber. Lawrence Gonzi called him in from the balcony as he saw him leaving the other palace, the glass one, with head hung low.

Unprecedented, it was the most reconciliatory political decision in our republican history. Not to mention that to get to it he had to endure sharp internal party strife as well as carry the heavy burden of shutting out his mentor, colleague and friend, Louis Galea.

The significance of Gonzi’s decision is thrown into sharper relief when viewed from another angle. When I asked Joseph Muscat whether he would, if he is our next prime minister, consider a PN politician for the presidency, he fell in with the cheering crowd. He said he had an eye for someone ‘outside’ of politics. A politician running down politicians for what is ultimately a political office – quite absurd, really.

In these two years, Abela rose to the occasion. He led a presidency that amply reciprocated Gonzi’s faith in him. I am very happy with the way things turned out and wish him even more success.

But I find it churlish and dishonest that some – certainly not the President himself – try to erase from our collective memory how we got here, those who brought us here and those who did not want us here.

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