While he did appoint six new faces as parliamentary secretaries, several promising MPs – including Robert Arrigo, David Agius, Franco Debono, and Stephen Spiteri were kept in the cold.

Not only did he fail to reshuffle his Cabinet after the PN crashed to a then-record 35,000 vote defeat at the 2009 European Parliament election, but he didn’t reshuffle it either when John Dalli was nominated to the EU Commission in 2010.

Instead, he added Dalli’s social policy portfolio to Education Minister Dolores Cristina and promoted Joe Cassar from parliamentary secretary of health to Health Minister, shrinking his Cabinet further.

In 2012, Gonzi finally reshuffled his team after Franco Debono, who back then was pushing a raft of justice reforms from the backbenches, warned that he would stop backing the government unless the Home Affairs and Justice Ministries were split.

However, this reshuffle didn’t promote a single PN MP from the backbenches. Instead, Chris Said, Mario De Marco, and Jason Azzopardi were simply promoted from parliamentary secretaries to ministers for justice, tourism and fair competition respectively.

Meanwhile, Austin Gatt and Dolores Cristina were retained as ministers even though both had publicly declared they weren’t going to contest the next general election. Gatt had also faced a number of controversies, including the Arriva public transport reform, the BWSC power station contract, as well as the oil scandal at the end of the legislature.

When Carm Mifsud Bonnici was forced to resign as Home Affairs Minister a few months later after losing a confidence vote in Parliament, his portfolio wasn’t given to a new MP but taken over by the Prime Minister himself.

And when Tonio Borg resigned as Foreign Minister in November 2012 to replace John Dalli as EU Commissioner in the wake of the snus scandal, he was replaced by Francis Zammit Dimech, a veteran MP who had served in previous Fenech Adami Cabinets.

PN went on to lose the 2013 general election by some 35,000 votes and the gap between it and the ruling PL has remained similar ever since.

The situation could not be any different under Abela.

Cabinet has ballooned in size and, at 27 members, is now practically twice as large as it was under Gonzi’s watch. Abela would rather splash out public resources on a “Ministry for Inclusion” that could very easily be incorporated into another ministry than shrink his team.

The Prime Minister’s comment to the press about how a lack of government “renewal” leads to stagnation wasn’t just an empty remark either.

Aaron Farrugia’s dismissal and Chris Fearne’s impending departure to Brussels means that Abela’s Cabinet will soon only have seven politicians who were part of Muscat’s top team five years ago.

That is a renewal of three-quarters of Cabinet within a single legislature, and Abela has so far carried this out without any signs of disgruntlement bubbling its way to the surface. Indeed, surveys have consistently shown that the electorate remains behind him.

While Gonzi’s Cabinet manoeuvres took place over a decade ago, the sequence of events leading up to the PN’s spectacular fall from grace will remain fresh in Abela’s mind, as it did in Muscat’s.

Elevating green politicians to Cabinet and spreading ministerial portfolios out over a large team comes with its own risks, but they are calculated risks that the Prime Minister is willing to take.

Abela seems to have learned lessons from the PN about how the electorate expects Cabinet to be formed and renewed, and this latest reshuffle shows he isn’t about to unlearn them anytime soon.

Cover photo: Left: Prime Minister Robert Abela with new Parliamentary Secretary for Public Works Omar Farrugia, Right: Former PM Lawrence Gonzi

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