Prime Minister Muscat is planning to do what Prime Minister Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici did

Before the Panamagate scandal broke, there were obvious indications that the government was gearing up for an early election. How early is anybody’s guess at this stage, though I think they were aiming for the six-month interval between the end of Malta’s six-month term in the EU presidency (30 June 2017) and the start of Valletta’s one-year stint as European Capital of Culture (1 January 2018).

There was a clear momentum gathering in that direction, and I had emails from seasoned civil servants, who have worked in the general service for decades, and who recognised the signs of a brewing election. They were being told to clear this, push that, move the other, files chased, cases hurried up and so on.

The polls published in Malta Today were already looking quite bad for Labour before the scandal broke, with the gap between the parties closing to within the margin of error and 10% of those who voted Labour in the last general election saying that they wouldn’t vote at all in the next. The only thing that the Labour Party had to its advantage is that Joseph Muscat led considerably on trust over Simon Busuttil. Muscat will have decided to go to an early election on that basis alone, before things got worse.

But I think we can safely conclude, with or without polls, that now even his lead on trust has gone. The scandal has been the top story in the news for 16 days. Though he has tried to behave as though he had nothing to do with it, few people believe the Prime Minister. Most either think he is involved with his henchmen in their Panama dealings or think that the way he handled the scandal is highly suspect.

Toughing it out and hoping it will go away are no longer options. That much would be clear even to Muscat at this stage. His cabinet are sullen and angry. None of them have spoken to the press or even appeared in public, with the exception of Konrad Mizzi himself, and those other henchmen Edward Zammit Lewis, the disreputable Chris Cardona, Owen Bonnici – who is gearing up to replace Louis Grech, and the tragic Deborah Schembri.

There is obvious tension and anger in the Labour Party itself, who now feel tricked into having Konrad Mizzi imposed on them even though they were warned by this website that he has corrupt holdings in Panama. Programmed by their own 25-year barrage against me and anything I write, brainwashed by their own propaganda, they dismissed it.

“We were shocked by what we read in her blog, but we don’t believe what she writes so we went ahead and voted for Mizzi anyway,” one cabinet minister told The Malta Independent, anonymously. Talk about being hoist by your own petard. Then in the deepening shock of the aftermath, they realised it was true. Since then, it will have dawned on them that the Prime Minister has kept Mizzi so close, and changed the rules to make him party deputy leader not because he didn’t know about Panama, but precisely because he knew. The people who vote for them may be the kind to be easily gulled, but Labour ministers themselves are, in their vast majority, sharks. By now, they will have put two and two together.

The Panamagate scandal has been a game-changer in Muscat’s electoral plans. It is obvious to him, a skilled schemer and manipulator ofcrowds, that the shift in public opinion is now so deep that it is permanent. He knows that his chances of winning an election, bar the arrival of a deus ex machina, are wrecked.

The plans for an early election are gone and instead there has been a move to Plan Z: stay on as long as possible, to the absolute limit allowed by law in what should be extraordinary circumstances (five years + six months) and use the time to escalate progress on the secret debts that are owed, the deals that have to be delivered on, and the secret money that has to be made, in the two and a half years that remain to them instead of the full decade on which they had based their calculations originally.

In other words, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat is going to do a Prime Minister Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, who led the worst and most frightening government in Maltese history, and who protracted his term of tortuous mayhem, marked by economic disaster, mass unemployment and mass demonstrations every Sunday, to the full five years + six months, from November 1981 to May 1987. By the time the population finally got the chance to vote him out, the feeling against the Labour premier was such that people would have gladly had him shot at dawn like his hero Nicolae Ceaucescu, though that freedom was still two and a half years away for the people of Romania.

Konrad Mizzi said on Times Talk two nights ago that he still had two and a half years to go in which he “will work harder and make up for it”. The Prime Minister said the same yesterday on Dissett. The significance of this hasn’t yet clicked with people because in our minds they have been in government for two and a half years. They haven’t. They have been in government for three years.

The law permits a general election to take place no later than five and a half years after the opening of parliament – but only PM KMB has ever used those extra six months. Muscat is planning on taking those six months too. Malta’s term as European Capital of Culture is going to be one long general election campaign culminating in an election in the high summer of 2018. At this stage, that’s what it looks like. And until then, they’re going to put the Great Train Robbers to shame.