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The Labour Party leadership was still dusting itself from a humiliating defeat after only 18 months in government when it was faced with the nomination of Anton Tabone as Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Alfred Sant, at the time Leader of the Opposition, and his deputy, George Abela, were informed of the nomination by Prime Minister Eddie Fenech Adami and invited to nominate a Deputy Speaker during a 15-minute meeting on October 14, 1998.
They eventually rejected the offer to nominate a deputy and, when Parliament convened 11 days later, they voted against the nomination of Mr Tabone, a former Gozo Minister who failed to get elected.
In his speech in Parliament on that day, Dr Sant criticised the Prime Minister for having “merely informed” rather than consulted the Opposition on Mr Tabone’s appointment. Moreover, he argued that “the prudent and decent thing for the Government to have done, given its five-seat majority, was to appoint one of its MPs as Speaker”.
Fast forward 15 years and you will find the Government and the Opposition behaving in a similar way. Only the parties have switched sides.
Despite a historic nine-seat majority, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat decided to give the Speakership to his former deputy leader, Anġlu Farrugia, whom he had booted out of the party at the beginning of the electoral campaign.
On the other side of the fence, Opposition Leader Lawrence Gonzi – who, in 1998, as Leader of the House was present at the meeting with the Labour leadership – found himself making the exact same arguments Dr Sant had made a decade-and-a-half earlier.
As Labour had done in 1998, the PN asked for a division on the Speaker’s nomination.
Dr Gonzi complained at the opening of Parliament on Saturday that the Opposition had not been consulted, adding that, given its nine-seat lead, the Government should have appointed the Speaker from within its benches.
He also argued that the Constitution itself suggested that the first preference in the appointment of the Speaker should be from the House. “From now onwards, every government will pick a Speaker from outside Parliament,” Dr Gonzi said.
Of course, there are significant differences in the two scenarios. This time round, the PN did not dig in its heels and still agreed to nominate Ċensu Galea as Deputy Speaker. And there is also Labour’s unprecedented nine-seat lead and the far less acrimonious atmosphere that reigns today when compared to 1998.
Though the 1996-1998 Labour Administration had collapsed as a result of its one-seat majority, as the last PN Government did, Dr Sant had won for his party a substantial majority in the previous election and not the wafer-thin lead secured by the Nationalists in 2008.
That perception of having been cheated by an unfavourable distribution of votes in 1996 kept dominating the outlook of the Labour leadership well into the 1998-2003 legislature.
But there are similarities too, such as in the way the parties reacted to the President’s address at the opening of the legislature, which is based on a text prepared by the Government of the day.
Dr Sant had said of the speech delivered by President Ugo Mifsud Bonnici that it “contained an element of partisanship which was out of place” and that the Government had tried to make a biased assessment of what precipitated the 1998 election.
Similarly, the Nationalist Party has accused the new Administration of drafting “one of the most partisan speeches”, replete with slogans used in the electoral campaign by the Labour leader.
Aside from the slogans, like reference to Labour’s Malta For All and that “we were elected as a movement and we will govern as a movement” – a phrase Dr Muscat used in his victory speech – the President’s speech also included arbitrary statements about the way the previous Adminis-tration handled the honoraria debacle, for instance.
Writing in The Times today, former Labour Minister Lino Spiteri acknowledges the “unnecessary verbosity” and “unusual” writing style of the speech but argues that the political content of the speech is to be expected, given that it effectively represents the Government’s “statement of intent”
Former PN Cabinet minister Michael Falzon, who was recently appointed to Enemalta’s oil procurement committee, agreed that the speech should reflect the political programme of the party in government but noted that certain jibes on the electoral campaign should have been avoided.
Additional reporting by Matthew Xuereb.