Lawrence Gonzi’s first full term of office as Prime Minister since the last election has almost run its full course. It is now very probable that we’ll have an election in 2013, a full five years since the last one, give or take a few weeks.

It is quite pertinent, at this point, to appraise these past five years and what Gonzi’s character and leadership have meant.

The last election, one should remember, was supposed to be a dead certain Labour victory. Official and unofficial polls gave Labour a substantial advantage before and into the first third of that campaign.

But Gonzi managed to turn it round and, with the polls giving the Nationalist Party a two-point advantage by mid-campaign, the party should have won by a normal margin in Malta had not Jeffrey Pullicino-Orlando’s Mistra affair upset a good campaign at the very end.

Gonzi’s very first decision was to restrict the number of government ministers and appoint the smallest Cabinet since Independence.

Many had clamoured for just such a move. Gonzi took this difficult decision immediately after the first election he won.

Difficult because it cost him the support of several who felt left out of what Malta had grown used to be an extravagance of Cabinet posts.

But it was the right decision that created a leaner, more focused Cabinet and demonstrated Gonzi’s courage.

Immediately into his first full term as Prime Minister, Gonzi faced his sternest test, a test that’s about the economy and, of course, jobs.

This is what interests people most. And this is what we take for granted, until we have a jobs crisis as we had in the 1980s and as we could have had since 2008 given the financial and economic crisis that engulfed most countries and that has now morphed into a debt, austerity and jobs crisis hitting millions of workers, students and youngsters abroad.

Here was a Prime Minister leading Malta’s very open economy who had decisions to make: keep pouring upwards of €50 million a year, every year, into energy subsidies and an unproductive dockyard or pump those same tens of millions of euros yearly into the factories we need in the future, tourism, small businesses and the education and training needed for jobs that pay well.

Many leaders abroad have not had the courage to reform and restructure their economies and take the hard decisions that are unpopular in the short term but work long term. Gonzi did.

Was the removal of universal energy subsidies unpopular? Of course it was. Was limiting such subsidies only to families in need fair? It was. Was it right to divert tens of millions of euros yearly into schemes for industry, tourism, airlines, small businesses, education, scholarships, Mcast, clean energy right? Of course it was.

And we know it was right because we can see the results. Record tourism year after year, in sharp contrast with the recession of the 1980s when tourism had all but collapsed.

New factories were attracted to Malta giving well-paying job opportunities to young Maltese who have grabbed the education, training and scholarships the Government has been providing for them.

Our small businesses are topmost in Europe with those in Germany and Austria. Malta and Germany are the only countries in Europe that have more people working and less unemployed now than in 2008.

New graduates number 20,000 since the last election.

Most important of all, 20,000 new jobs were created, making up for those lost due to restructuring and ending up with a net gain of 10,000 full time jobs, all in the private sector.

These are Gonzi’s results. These are the results that count for most people: jobs and wages. But these are also the results of Gonzi’s character. He had several detractors from within the PN. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to know why.

Operating as he is within the limits of a clearly political context that makes him Prime Minister only until a clear majority votes against him in Parliament, he has shown more than once that he is a man of integrity while still playing his hand shrewdly.

Gonzi has shown again and again that he gives utmost regard to the integrity of those he appoints to Cabinet.

His politics are not the politics of patronage to keep everyone happy but principled politics, even though still politics. And this is what has made him not only a Prime Minister of fine economic results, in stark contrast to most other countries, but also, and perhaps above all, a Prime Minister of integrity.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.