It seems that, since we published this column a month ago, the great trust impasse has been dislodged.
Prior opposition leader Bernard Grech’s formal resignation announcement on Tuesday, the Maltese electorate faced a deadlock between the two weakest leaders in Malta’s independent history.
Prime minister Robert Abela can certainly boast of more stable trust ratings than Grech. But they are definitely not healthy indicators of a leader who enjoys a comfortable level of trust, either.
Now that Grech finally got around to reading the room, the deadlock can be broken. Enter the unquestioned frontrunner and current president of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola.
With a rising star so big that she managed to overshadow Grech by simply being in the room, Nationalist Party supporters have spent years hoping she will return to our shores – implicitly assuming that she will be able to carry the team and bring the prized trophy home.
When rumours first began to circulate about Grech’s resignation a month ago, the prime minister had already fired off a warning shot.
In a bizarre interview with the ever-faithful Saviour Balzan, the prime minister publicly declared that he would consider a snap election if the Nationalist Party elects a new leader.
Following this week’s developments, journalists followed up on those remarks.
As reported here, Abela yet again refused to rule out a snap election, insisting it is his “prerogative” to determine when this should happen and how it would be done to best serve “the national interest.”
In such a volatile context, every other journalist who’s not doorstepping local politicians must be bombarding Metsola’s media team like there’s no tomorrow. By publication time Wednesday morning, Metsola had not yet declared her intent.
While I do have plenty of reservations about Metsola’s handling of the genocide in Gaza and the increasingly rightward shift that the European People’s Party has adopted, I must acknowledge that the EP president is in between a rock and a hard place right now.
Will she accept the poisoned chalice of trying to turn around an isolated party that’s drowning in the polls while facing off with one of the most hostile governments in Maltese history?
Or will she stay put, stick to her mandate, and then figure out her next step when her term as EP president ends in early 2027?
Both options are fraught with potentially career-ending perils. On the one hand, the sheer pressure of the high expectations placed upon her by the rest of her beleaguered party will be very difficult to live up to, even for a popular powerhouse like Metsola.
That, along with the prime minister’s open threat to kneecap any new leader by calling a snap election at the worst possible time, will be a lot to deal with. It will be a cutthroat electoral campaign in which Metsola will be expected to convince the electorate that her Brussels-honed skill set can quickly be adapted to the local context, in spite of the fact that she has no prior experience at the helm of a national government.
That is without even mentioning the fact that anything less than a miraculous Nationalist Party comeback with a strong majority would instantly deflate the almost god-like status that she enjoys among her most ardent supporters.
The other option, which may seem like the safest one at first glance, nonetheless carries plenty of potentially devastating pitfalls.
A decision to refuse her own domestic party’s incessant pleas for her to take over might also cut down the broad swath of support she enjoys among the electorate.
A key aspect of the Metsola brand has always been that she claims to be a politician who genuinely wants to serve her voters in the best possible manner. Whether she does live up to that or not is a different conversation – what matters here is that her supporters will just as quickly turn her back on her if they feel like she has left them rudderless just when she was needed most.
So, the choice that needs to be made here is a very difficult one: it’s either risk it all to truly serve your country or distance yourself as much as possible from the domestic context with little to no hope of credibly claiming leadership at a later stage. Big fish in a small pond, or just another big fish swimming in the ocean. There is no in between here.
The choice is going to be further complicated by whoever declares their interest in the leadership race. Metsola is in the privileged position of getting to decide whether she wants to be in charge or whether she wants to risk allowing an as-of-yet unknown quantity to take over.
What if the next leader of the Nationalist Party turns out to be another dud who tries and fails to mirror the Labour Party while also trying to maintain the moral high ground? Will there even be a Nationalist Party to speak of if the next leader fails to win the general elections?
Unless someone is identified as a suitable substitute candidate that would appeal to the broad base that wants Metsola to be in charge, the options being floated around do not in any way, shape, or form inspire any hope that the Nationalist Party can reinvent itself and provide real meaning to its words and actions.
No pressure.