A second lesson in good governance from France

France this week served up a second lesson in good governance and political accountability in as many years, lessons that Malta would do well to heed.

In France, an anti-corruption association filed a complaint about a potential conflict of interest between the president’s chief of staff’s current role and his family links to Mediterranean Shipping Company, where he had worked as chief financial officer.

Alexis Kohler joined French President Emmanuel Macron’s team as chief of staff after the 2017 election.

This week, on the slightest hint of possible corruption, French financial prosecutors opened an investigation into whether the rules related to conflicts of interests while in a public position have been respected.

Note: this is a mere whiff compared to the overbearing stench that has been hanging over Malta since our own Prime Minister’s chief of staffed and his lead minister were both exposed, in tandem, in the Panama Papers. But where Macron would suffer no such stench, our Prime Minister appears to bask in it. And while Macron knows full well that the French electorate would give no quarter to a whiff of corruption, Joseph Muscat’s political strength has actually increased without having taken any such action.

Just imagine Muscat’s electoral popularity had he taken action against the offending pair.

It is not new for a chief of staff to have previously been involved in business, Macron’s chief of staff was, and so was Muscat’s. But there is one big, rather enormous difference.

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The French government leapt into action and began investigating as soon as the accusations were levelled. In Malta, the accusations, and proof, have been staring all and sundry in the face, for over two years and not s ingle finger was lifted to investigate.

Quite the opposite, in fact, the reports by Malta’s own financial intelligence unit were, by all reports, buried by the unit while successive police commissioners have preferred resigning to investigating their political masters.

The previous lesson from France was during Macron’s 2017 election campaign, when four ministers all stepped down days after news broke that they could be facing investigations – not that they are being investigated, but that they could be investigated.

The backdrop was French President Emmanuel Macron’s leading campaign pledge to put more ethics into politics, as was Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat’s lead campaign pledge back in 2013.

What a far cry all this is from the situation in Malta, where even ministers and top aides caught with the proverbial smoking gun in their hands cling fast to their positions, and where a Prime Minister defends them to the quick and even reappoints them after election.

We in Malta evidently have a long, long way to go if we are to ever reach France’s standards of political accountability.

Such considerations and standards need to come first and foremost from the electorate, for if the electorate never demands such accountability, it will never happen.

A real change and real political accountability will only be instilled in this, or any other, country when the people demand it. The opposition has failed miserably on that score over this last election campaign.

It is not until the people begin to demand more of their politicians that politicians will deliver and set themselves higher standards.

Imagine if you will for a moment that a French cabinet member responsible for some of the biggest sales of national assets and infrastructure deals with the private sector the had been caught with his pants down owning a company in Panama that had been set up in the wake of the last election.

Imagine that minister had simply been cosmetically stripped of his portfolio but continued carrying out practically the exact same functions as before and had been simply made to stand down as deputy leader of the party in government.

Imagine that minister was reappointed to Cabinet after an election and was put in charge of public private partnerships, the likes for which he had orchestrated over the past legislature and who stands accused of having received kickbacks from such deals.

One would not be too hard pressed to imagine the French bringing the guillotine back to the streets of Paris.

Malta’s Prime Minister had said he only listens to Prime Ministers, not MEPs, when faced with the findings of the European Parliament’s PANA Committee and Rule of Law delegation. Perhaps he could have a listen to Macron, and take a page out his book.