For some countries, the so-called Arab Spring, for all intents and purposes has come and gone. Egypt and Tunisia, for example, have usurped their long-time dictators. In others, the struggle continues. Libya remains an enormous ongoing problem; and Syria and Yemen are still on the verge of a breaking point.

But while the tyrants, at least some of them, have been removed, the basic bread and butter issues - those that catalysed an otherwise business-as-usual Arab winter and spring into the Arab Spring - remain. And in many ways, that Arab Spring succeeded where terrorist ideology as espoused by Al Qaeda and the late not so great Osama bin Laden failed. The latter had sought the downfall of the Arab word’s dictators, but failed to gain the pivotal mass support that the bread and butter issues garnered and leveraged.

Those basic bread and butter issues are still very much with us today. The food and basic commodity prices that had first brought Tunisians and Egyptians to the streets are still near all time highs, and as of the beginning of this month, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, they were still a whopping 36% above prices back in April 2010 and just two% below the peak they hit back in February of this year. Food prices are now beginning to smart more than ever, and the economic ripple effect on consumption and production are taking their tolls.

The PIGS of Europe (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) have been in meltdown for a long time now and they have still not recovered from the beating their economies took during the financial crisis and economic meltdown that had swept across the world leaving crippled economies in their wake.

These events and problems are well documented and protests have not been uncommon. But matters have now appeared to have reached a whole new level in Spain, where thousands of protestors have been taking to the streets of Madrid and other cities to protest against the country’s 21% unemployment rate, a 44.6% youth jobless rate and the country’s record 4.9 million jobless. The situation, compounded by government fiscal malaise and the rising commodity prices the world over is a bread and butter issue but it also has a distinct political flavour.

These are, again, pure bread and butter issues – the kind of issues that, perhaps more than political scandals, create the most serious unrest in a country. But the Spanish protests also come in the closing days of the campaign for local elections set for Sunday. Spain’s 8,000 cities and towns will elect mayors, along with 13 regional presidents and parliaments. People have used the waning hours of the campaign to vent their frustration and anger.

The wider EU is not without its deep economic woes and it would in reality take one more good jolt to set matters off once again. Malta, the last time around, escaped the more devastating effects of the recession by the skin of its teeth and thanks to sound fiscal steering in what was an economic hurricane.

Malta, as an economy, must not fall into complacency in the face of a possible recurrence of the threats it by and large circumvented the last time around should such malaise continue to spread among our trading partners to the south and north - lest we be caught between an Arab Spring and a European Summer.