The details are flimsy, but at one point our President must have told the Prime Minister he is not prepared to sign the Civil Unions Bill into law on moral grounds. We do not know when he told him this, but it really makes no difference. There are principles involved here, and the Prime Minister is again way out of his depth.
Contrary to the impression given, it is not the President who has been delaying the Civil Unions Bill but the Prime Minister. The Bill, approved in Committee stage on February 25, still needs to go through its third reading before it goes to the President. It has not.
The President may be objecting to the Bill on the grounds that it puts civil union “at par” with marriage, as our eternally liberal Civil Liberties Minister Helena Dalli likes to put it. She conveniently ignores the fact that Labour has no such mandate because Labour only promised civil union, not gay marriage and even less gay adoption. The President may be just objecting to gay adoption. We really do not know what exactly he finds objectionable. He will not speak, and that is his greatest fault and failure.
In any case, he seems to have taken a position on a point of principle. Until he remains President, if the Bill goes through its third reading and ends up on his desk, he is constitutionally bound to sign it. Or resign. Joseph Muscat has preferred to wait out until the President’s term is over.
Muscat won’t speak about the issue (he doesn’t speak about much nowadays, except to tell us how energetic his government is, and that’s usually in a tweet). He simply said the Civil Unions Bill is on track. This is shameful. It reflects weakness and immense political immaturity on the part of the Prime Minister.
Only some weeks ago, he was throwing a tantrum over the Nationalist Party’s stand on gay marriage and gay adoptions.
He pompously declared: “I will not compromise on my principles!” His (one) principle was based on his belief in equality, and he would stand alone if necessary, or so he proclaimed.
Well, one man has come along, a man the Prime Minister has the power to remove, and said he disagrees with the Bill, also on principle. What does our Prime Minister do? He backs down.
If he truly meant what he said, he would never have done that. Clearly civil rights are all just spin for him. The gay community has been taken for a ride. The Prime Minister never believed a word he told them. If this really were a matter of principle for him, he would have sought a showdown and presented the Bill to the President to sign, even if it was his last day in office. He did nothing of the sort.
This revelation that the President would not sign a Bill, presented by a party he once contested the leadership of, is very significant and puts recent statements into perspective. Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca, our next president, has already said she would sign the Bill. Interesting, for someone who was against the introduction of divorce but is now ready to sign a Bill that would undermine one of the most fundamental pillars of society – the family. And we were all led to believe she was taking on her new role reluctantly.
Also significant is a recent statement by the Prime Minister, where he said he foresaw a future role for President George Abela after his termination of office. It makes you wonder if this was another of Muscat’s usual stunts to buy people off with public appointments, a stunt that works miracles with some people but not with people who stand by their principles.
The problem with having a Prime Minister who has thrown political values to the wind and replaced them by the politics of convenience is that he is utterly unable to handle such situations.
There is no moral compass to fall back on, so he must sneak himself out of every situation. He’s very good at that, actually the only thing he is good at.
Contrary to the impression given, it is not the President who has been delaying the Civil Unions Bill, but the Prime Minister
The only significant ‘achievements’ of his government so far were backroom deals, none of which appeared on his electoral programme. Hence we had the EU passports sales scheme shoved down our throats, the part-sale of Enemalta to China, the sudden re-emergence of disgraced EU commissioner John Dalli, and of course, gay marriage.
Labour politics with Muscat at the helm have degenerated to such a level that we have an Energy Minister boasting that the government will so far be raking in €10 million from people who bribed Enemalta officials to tamper with their smart meters.
No amount of money justifies corruptors getting away with their crimes scot-free, as no amount of money can ever justify selling someone else’s passports. But that is Labour for you.
Had Abela won the leadership race against Muscat in 2008, it is unlikely he would have done any of the above. He would have won the election, possibly with equally stunning results, but he would have done so on policy, not backroom deals.
When the Labour Party delegates opted for Muscat and not Abela, it was a conscious choice – they just wanted to win the election, at any cost. Interestingly, a 2008 survey by The Malta Independent on Sunday had revealed that while most people believed that Labour would eventually choose Muscat, Abela would have made a better leader.
How prophetic that survey was, and now look what we’re stuck with.
None of this leaves the current President untainted. That offensive speech at the opening of Parliament last year was something he should have never accepted to read, also on principle. But he did.
It was a speech riddled with insults or, as former prime minister Lawrence Gonzi perfectly put it, it read like a script written by a Super One journalist. Yes, and that ‘journalist’ is now prime minister.
As for Abela’s problem with gay marriage or gay adoption, his token objection is just not enough. He is the President. Apart from being a guardian of the Constitution, he is also the only (ostensibly) uniting factor that this country has. Yes, he has raised huge sums for charity, €15 million in five years, but charity does not make a president, although his successor thinks so.
In what has become his trademark hypocritical sense of irony, the Prime Minister had this to say on this President’s term in office: “His presidency strongly upheld our values as a people and respected at all times the fact that our country is made up of people of different ideas and beliefs, at a time when the people of Malta and Gozo, with maturity, made important electoral decisions. The years of Dr Abela’s presidency were a time when our society accepted to adapt itself to new realities.”
That ‘new reality’ is gay marriage and gay adoption, of course. That is where the Prime Minister’s liberalism begins and ends; not out of belief, as we have seen, but for the gay vote that helped get him into power.
If the President truly upheld people’s values, as Muscat claims, then he would have spoken out publicly against gay marriage and adoption. That would have been an earth-shaking event in local politics, and would have raised the role of the presidency to an unprecedented level, one where he would have truly become a voice for the people’s conscience.
He did no such thing, and it is a shame, because now we cannot expect much better from his successor, who confuses charity with social services, to the point that she feels she must open an office in Gozo to be near the people.
A president is not just required to be close to the people, but to speak for the people and come to their defence when all else fails. It is rare that an issue merits a president’s intervention.
Gay marriage and adoption, without an electoral mandate, was one such case. This President has let us down.