Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca sticks to her values and that is something that cannot be said about most of her colleagues. Photo: Matthew Mirabelli

Being on the lazy end, I’ve never attended any of those marathon runs patronised by the President. And being rather allergic to rowdiness and crowds, I’ve never attended any of the President’s charity events either. That doesn’t mean I don’t like the President or what he does. I just know I probably won’t like the next one.

The decision of the Prime Minister to appoint Social Policy Minister Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca as president with a remit to lead the country’s social policy strategies is perverse. Forget the real reason why he is promoting out his most popular minister.

The end result is we are being lumped with a president who will be implementing Labour’s electoral programme, a programme for which a sizeable portion of the electorate did not vote. This is not the job of the president.

The Prime Minister says that putting Coleiro Preca in charge of numerous commissions is perfectly legal. So is the selling of EU passports and look where it got us. This so-called ‘social agenda’ presidency will be responsible for a host of policies, including fighting poverty, family and child policy, substance abuse and domestic violence.

It is not social policy that unites the country, charity does that

“In this manner, the presidency will have an aim,” the Prime Minister said, maybe oblivious to how offensive that sounds to all presidents so far.

The next president’s remit covers areas where the ideological differences between left and right are possibly at their starkest.

Her latest policy announcement of a supplementary allowance for children living in ‘poverty’, and where these ‘children’ will continue to receive the allowance until they turn 23, is a case in point. This is socialism at its worst. It breeds dependency on government, strains the country’s coffers and will never work because the problem is cultural, not financial.

In an interview with The Sunday Times of Malta, Coleiro Preca said the issues she will be given to handle concern the national interest.

Everything that a government does should be in the national interest. It is how to go about doing it that ideologically divides parties and it should be so.

Yet, Coleiro Preca says she wants to be a catalyst for unity in the country. It is not social policy that unites the country, charity does that and that is exactly where the current and past presidents succeeded.

The President has few executive powers, the post is largely ceremonial and with good reason.

It gives him moral power. Our Prime Minister thinks the ceremonial role is limiting but that must be because he thinks that politics is only about the power he wields so flagrantly.

Just north of us, the Italian presidency is also largely looked upon as ceremonial but the role played by President Giorgio Napolitano in the recent turbulent years in Italian politics goes to show the moral power a president can have in the affairs of the country. When he speaks, Italy listens.

Coleiro Preca shows she is a strong independent thinker, a socialist unfortunately, but she sticks to her values and that is something that cannot be said about most of her Cabinet colleagues.

As a social policy coordinator from the office of the President, Coleiro Preca’s initiatives will depend upon a Cabinet whose advice, the Constitution says, she must follow. She could not be in a weaker position. She could try moral persuasion like the Italian President but to do that she may have to go public.

It remains to be seen how far she’ll go but even her Italian counterpart doesn’t delve into specific government policies and she would have to. Which is another reason why her assigned role is a bad idea.

With this move, the government and the Labour Party have divested themselves of the last vestige of socialism. From now on, Labour social policy will be the President’s pet theme, nothing more. Labour as an ideology is dead. One is tempted to cheer but the alternative being presented is just as gruesome.

Labour’s embracing of the business class is not ideologically based but simply a pragmatic tool to obtain and maintain power. Forget its strong ties with the local hotel and building industries for reasons obvious to us all. It is the partnership with the likes of Henley & Partners that is of utmost concern because this smacks of South American banana republic politics where State and big business work hand in hand.

Through the EU passport sale scheme, our economic policy, soon even our very Budget, will be at the mercy of a private international company whose interest is to pocket a generous commission. This is dangerous business, but not unusual to Malta’s Labour Party.

For some uncanny reason Labour always finds it more comfortable doing business with the likes of China, Russia and Azerbaijan. Until recently, Ukraine was on that list but democracy seems to be raising its head again there and that’s not good business for Labour.

Our no-longer-Labour-turned-Neo-Liberal government is uncomfortable doing business with western companies. Ask Scottish bus operator McGill’s about that. They couldn’t take the government’s shiftiness and left.

So, instead, we get another brand of capitalism, one that is shrouded in secrecy and that thrives only in undemocratic countries. It arrives on private jets, gets provided with police escort in plainclothes, pockets a EU passport and then flies off again. Our government calls it foreign investment. Considering how much these investors seem to value their privacy, we can suppose the country can look forward to a boon in the security industry when these investors come to reside here as Maltese. But we all know they won’t.

With Coleiro Preca gone, the government, and most especially the Prime Minister, has no moral compass. His wife appears to have the same problems.

At an event to mark Women’s Day, an infuriating and offensive commemoration to any woman who believes in herself, Michelle Muscat said the reason why women opt to stay at home to raise their children is Catholic social teaching.

Maybe it escapes her but raising children is a beautiful and satisfying full-time job for both mother and father, should they be able to afford it. She thinks stay-at-home mums are not reaching their full potential. She asked: “Is it because our very Catholic country judges us when we do not participate fully in our children’s lives?” Women should not be made to feel guilty or judged if they cannot pick their children up from school, she said.

It doesn’t take a Catholic country to judge negatively parents who, to use her words, do not participate fully in the lives of their children. It takes a country that believes in values. Picking up children from school has nothing to do with parenthood.

If more mothers and fathers stayed at home to give their children a good family upbringing, based on the immense wealth of values that make up the Catholic Church’s social teachings, then Coleiro Preca would have had much less on her plate as minister. At the end of the day, with a welfare State such as ours, poverty is often the result of lack of values, education and a sense of responsibility.

The Prime Minister’s wife does not think so. She told the seminar that she didn’t like it when a catechist asks a child why her mother did not attend one of the “ongoing series of religious discussions”. She said: “We are all adults and we have passed that phase in our lives.”

Yes, many like her do believe they are no longer children, know it all already, and have passed “that phase”.

It may explain why the majority of adults appear to support her husband’s government.