Everyone Is Treating The Chief Justice As A Political Asset – And That’s The Real Scandal

If the chief justice of Malta were truly seen as a neutral custodian of the rule of law, this appointment would not look like this. There would be disagreements, yes.…

If the chief justice of Malta were truly seen as a neutral custodian of the rule of law, this appointment would not look like this.

There would be disagreements, yes. There would be caution, backroom negotiations, and probably some bruised egos. But there would not be this level of brinkmanship, delay, public posturing, or tactical leaking. There would not be factions digging in, red lines being drawn, and reputations quietly weighed not on competence, but on perceived advantage.

They wouldn’t be fighting this hard if they didn’t think it mattered. And that is the real scandal.

Because what this episode reveals, more than anything else, is a shared and deeply corrosive assumption across Malta’s political class: that who sits at the top of the judiciary meaningfully affects political outcomes. That some judges are “safer” than others. That certain appointments are worth blocking, not because the candidate is unfit, but because the consequences of their decisions might be inconvenient.

Once you accept that premise, everything else starts to make sense — and none of it is reassuring.

Let’s start with the obvious. The constitutional requirement for a two-thirds majority to appoint a chief justice was meant to depoliticise the role. In theory, it forces consensus. In practice, without an anti-deadlock mechanism, it does the opposite. It turns the process into a game of chicken, where delay is rewarded and obstruction carries no cost. Everyone knows this. Everyone warned about it. And yet here we are, acting surprised that the system is being gamed.

The government’s decision to publicly name Consuelo Scerri Herrera as its nominee was, at best, reckless. Once a name is out there, it is no longer just a candidate — it becomes a symbol. It hardens positions. It invites campaigns, whispers, and selective outrage. It makes consensus harder, not easier. If the aim was smooth agreement, this was the wrong move.

But if the aim was to draw a line — to say that the government will no longer negotiate under pressure from factions, NGOs, or internal opposition politics — then the move starts to look more deliberate. Robert Abela has said before, explicitly, that conceding too much during the 2020 constitutional talks — including accepting the absence of an anti-deadlock mechanism — was a mistake. It is not implausible that this time he has decided not to blink.

That doesn’t make the approach wise. But it does make it coherent.

Where this begins to look far less defensible is on the Opposition’s side. For over a decade now, the Nationalist Party has increasingly treated the courts not simply as an independent branch of the state, but as an alternative route to political accountability.

In the face of a government that continued to deliver results, or at least to be perceived as doing so by the electorate, the Opposition often appeared to shift its centre of gravity away from political persuasion and towards legal intervention, formally or through actors operating in its orbit.

This is not to say that legal action is illegitimate. Quite the opposite. But when legal proceedings become the primary political strategy — the shortcut rather than the safeguard — something fundamental is lost. Politics becomes reactive. Governance becomes something to be litigated rather than argued for. And judges, inevitably, are drawn into the political arena whether they want to be or not.

In that context, it is difficult to ignore the pattern. The intensity with which parts of the Opposition and its adjacent ecosystem have resisted this appointment does not stem from a demonstrable lack of competence. No serious figure has come forward to argue that Scerri Herrera’s rulings are unsound, her legal reasoning deficient, or her grasp of the law questionable. On the contrary, even her critics tend to concede the same thing: she is efficient, decisive, and effective — adjectives rarely associated with Malta’s chronically backlogged courts.

Yes, there are legitimate criticisms. She has not always kept the low public profile traditionally expected of members of the judiciary. She is related to former minister José Scerri Herrera — a fact that has been known for years and scrutinised relentlessly. Malta is small; conflicts of interest are endemic; what matters is how they are managed. By most accounts, she has navigated that reality carefully and under constant observation.

Then there is the elephant in the room: her long-standing feud with Daphne Caruana Galizia — the journalist whose assassination became the catalyst for much of the rule-of-law reform Malta has undergone over the past decade. That murder did not just expose corruption; it permanently altered the country’s political psychology. It still colours almost every serious institutional debate we have.

In the years since, Malta has increasingly divided into two broad camps. On one side are those who continue to champion Daphne’s cause — justice for her murder, accountability for everyone implicated in wrongdoing, and a belief that corruption can and should be legislated out of public life through ever-stronger institutional safeguards. On the other are those who see that moment as one that has already been absorbed into the state’s reform process, and who bristle at what they perceive as permanent mobilisation around a single case.

For those in the first camp, history matters — deeply. Personal positions taken before 2017 are not easily forgotten, and past conflicts are often read as moral signals rather than contextual disputes. In that light, the fact that Scerri Herrera was openly at war with Daphne for years inevitably adds another layer to how her appointment is perceived. Not because it proves bias, incompetence, or wrongdoing — it doesn’t — but because it collides with a collective memory that remains raw, unresolved, and politically potent.

It does not automatically disqualify her. But it does make consensus harder, emotions sharper, and trust more difficult to assemble — particularly among those who still see Daphne’s legacy as the central moral axis of Malta’s institutional reform.

Which brings us back to the uncomfortable inference: that the fight is not about propriety alone, but about perceived outcomes. About who might be tougher on whom. About who might accelerate proceedings, close doors, or refuse to indulge political theatre dressed up as legal principle.

Ironically, in this regard, the government’s position appears marginally more defensible. Whatever else can be said, Scerri Herrera does not have a reputation as a partisan actor. If anything, she has operated for years under heightened scrutiny precisely because critics were waiting for a misstep. That she has emerged from that environment with her professional reputation largely intact is not nothing.

The Opposition, by contrast, seems trapped in a reflex it cannot shake: if you don’t control the political terrain, contest it in court. If you can’t win the argument, escalate it judicially. The result is a slow but steady erosion of trust — not just in politicians, but in the judiciary itself.

Because once judges are openly treated as assets or liabilities, the damage is already done.

A chief justice should not be this important to anyone’s political fortunes. And the fact that she is tells us far more about the state of our politics than about the suitability of any individual candidate.

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