Abela's New Cabinet: Ministers Sworn In
Robert Abela stood in the Grand Master's Palace yesterday and watched twenty-one ministers take their oath of office — the largest cabinet in Malta's history.
Abela's New Cabinet: Ministers Sworn In
Robert Abela stood in the Grand Master's Palace yesterday and watched twenty-one ministers take their oath of office — the largest cabinet in Malta's history. Three days after Labour's fourth consecutive election victory, the machinery of government expanded again. The ceremony was grand. The bill will be larger.
This cabinet costs taxpayers €19 million annually, according to Times of Malta calculations. Twenty-one ministers plus two parliamentary secretaries means Malta now has more ministers per capita than most European nations. Abela has created jobs for nearly half his parliamentary group. Every ministry gets a face. Every face gets a salary.
The numbers tell their own story. In 1987, Dom Mintoff ran Malta with twelve cabinet members. Eddie Fenech Adami governed through the 1990s with fourteen. Joseph Muscat started with fifteen in 2013, grew to seventeen by 2017. Now Abela commands twenty-three paid positions around his cabinet table. Each election cycle, the government grows heavier.
Opposition MP Ivan Sammut called it "unbridled abuse" of state resources during the campaign. He was speaking about alleged misuse of government facilities for electoral purposes, but the phrase fits this expansion too. When you win by the margins Labour did — a comfortable but not overwhelming victory — creating more ministerial posts looks less like governance and more like political mathematics.
The swearing-in happened while construction workers pumped water from a flooded hotel site in Sliema, where a partially submerged excavation vehicle sat trapped in the foundations like a monument to Malta's building boom. The symbolism was accidental but perfect: above ground, ministers multiplied; below ground, the island's infrastructure strained under weight it was never designed to carry.
Two parliamentary secretaries will assist the twenty-one ministers. Malta now employs one minister for every 22,000 citizens. Compare that to Germany's sixteen ministers governing 84 million people, or Britain's twenty-two ministers for 67 million. The island that once prided itself on punching above its weight now governs with a cabinet that weighs more than countries fifty times its size.
Abela promised during the campaign to deliver Labour's manifesto commitments. With twenty-three paid positions to fill, he certainly has the personnel. Whether Malta has the budget for this expansion will become clear when the first quarterly spending reports land on his newly expanded cabinet table.
The ministers sworn in yesterday will serve until 2031 — five years to justify their salaries and their promises.
