It’s safe to assume that the majority of die-hard Nationalists spent yesterday night sticking pins into their Franco Debono effigy (everyone has one nowadays, buy two get one free from the monti).
Well, I think they should be sending him thank you cards, as he is single-handedly responsible for giving the PN a fresh chance at winning the upcoming elections. Labourites, who are hailing him as their hero, would do well to do the opposite.
Government officially lost its majority yesterday. The move came not as a result of some massive blunder on the part of the Nationalist legislature. There have been plenty of those, of course, but all were irrelevant to yesterday’s events. Instead, the automatic vote of no confidence was tied to what everyone agreed was a pretty reasonable money bill.
I’m not one to criticise PN just because it’s ‘cool’ to do so. In many cases the outgoing cabinet messed up big-time (remember the divorce bill, anyone?) With this budget, they cleverly didn’t.
Everyone agreed, PL included. And yet, we woke up this morning to a dissolved parliament, because one man decided that “hey, I’m having quite a bad year, let’s just spread the cheer around shall we?”
Forcing government to call an election after presenting the voters with a gift-wrapped budget instantly transforms the party in power from villain to long-suffering superhero. With Franco Debono as the li’l so’n’so who ruined a perfectly good Christmas season for everyone.
When they’re in the polling booth, this is what swingers (the voting kind, not the let’s-swap-our-car-keys kind) will remember. And they will vote accordingly.
The Labour Party could have had a go at turning the situation in their favour, of course. Voting for a budget that he agreed with in principle would have marked Joseph Muscat as the better man. We were due an election soonish anyway; it wouldn’t have cost him anything.
Had the PL opted to do the unthinkable (voting with government on a money bill is indeed unthinkable in normal circumstances – but then again these are hardly normal circumstances, are they?), undecided voters would have remembered this when they were in the polling both. But they didn’t. So I guess the voters won’t.
Yup. Lawrence Gonzi definitely owes Franco Debono a thank you card.