Talk of a certain early election could turn out to be wrong at this stage. There is no certainty on what will happen in the House of Representatives on Thursday when it votes on the Labour opposition’s no-confidence motion in the government.

Nationalist MP Franco Debono holds the key to which one of four possible scenarios will become a reality.

By now it is more than easy to see where he’s coming from. Aside from the vicious personal attacks on him, which Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi permitted for far too long without condemning them, he is not quite the position-seeker he has been made out to be. If he were that, he wouldn’t have prejudiced, even destroyed, his political future at a time when it could be taking off.

He has made public what he stands for and what he stands for – a better working democracy – makes sense. He has also been blunt with his criticism of some issues and, thereby, of those ministers who are politically accountable for them.

Practically, nobody has convinced the public that the transport reform was not a mess, so much so that an integral part of its basis – radical route changes – had to be discarded. Dr Debono said the obvious when he observed that the reform was so questionable that the Prime Minister had to set up a task force to manage it.

Similarly, few would not agree that the situation in the country’s prison is highly unsatisfactory. Prison is essentially a corrective institution meant to reform inmates. Instead, too many condemned to it end up more corrupted than they had been before entering.

Remarkably, this background elicited thunderous applause from his party for the Transport Minister and an “elevation”, as the Prime Minister put it, for the minister responsible for prisons.

There were other issues which the government should have tackled, almost 25 years into its life, eight of them under Dr Gonzi’s premiership. Yet, it had to be Dr Debono’s dogged persistence to bring them to the fore on the national agenda.

One can understand him when he says he is a victim of a defective political system. He was called upon by his party to resign while no such call was made to non-performing ministers.

The situation is indeed full of political irony. If nothing else comes out of it, we should take a fresh and critical look at what we mean by a truly functioning parliamentary system and, above all, by political accountability.

The way the present Prime Minister has turned his office into a Me-Me-Me platform should also make us as a people consider whether we want a quasi-Presidential system without the requisite internal checks and balances.

Dr Debono, in his passionate retorts to the accusations made against him, has also drawn attention to the power some unelected – and, therefore, unaccountable – individuals wield in the corridors of power, up to the Cabinet.

For all that, there is no certainty about what will happen on Thursday. The following are all possible scenarios:

Dr Debono, after God knows what will have gone on behind the scenes, might vote with the government. In that case, Dr Gonzi will be awarded a new lease of life.

Dr Debono might not turn up for the vote or abstain. In that case the Speaker’s casting vote will ensure the opposition’s motion is defeated. Nevertheless, the government will have lost its moral and practical authority to continue in office.

Dr Debono may remain true to his word and vote for the no-confidence motion, in which case Dr Gonzi’s government would be defeated.

A new scenario could develop at this stage.

Dr Gonzi might quickly resign as leader of the PN and Prime Minister with another MP being appointed in his place as leader of the PN. In that case the President will probably be obliged to send for the new Nationalist leader to check if s/he can command a majority in the House. The reply will depend on what has been discussed and concluded by the PN with Dr Debono.

In all four scenarios Dr Debono’s decision is critical. But in the last scenario, Dr Gonzi’s decision would be the most critical. He might decide to resign, so that the PN, currently said to be lagging behind Labour in the opinion polls, can stay in office. After the furore that followed the Cabinet juggle on January 6, he had given a hint he might be ready to do that.

Whether he will want to do so, or whether his party would wish him to do it, without some political deal being arranged for the future when Dr Debono is no longer around, is impossible to forecast.