One wonders whether Minister Tonio Fenech got on the right train or whether he went somewhere else by mistake instead.

For he told our sister Sunday paper that the Poland meeting of Ecofin over the weekend added “a very important weapon in the EU’s war chest” in the battle EU governments are waging against the sovereign debt crisis – which has already forced Greece, Portugal and Ireland into multi-billion euro bailouts – and increasingly jittery international financial markets.

This is definitely not the reaction that was reported across Europe on Sunday. The papers, especially those with a respected readership, spoke instead of a Europe that is unraveling. The situation was perhaps crystalised by German chancellor Angela Merkel who, after another drubbing at the polls (this time Berlin) warned that the euro was in peril and that if the euro goes, so will the EU.

This dire prediction hardly accords with Mr Fenech’s understated optimism that a solution has been found for the problems besetting the euro.

The same pessimistic outlook comes through from every paper or news analysis one reads. Only parts of the Commission and perhaps the ECB still act as if the danger will be overcome.

According to the UK’s Sunday Times, buried deep in a government office there is a file ready which states what must be done if Greece defaults.

And yet the Commission, and Mr Fenech echoes it, still say that the situation is under control and that thanks to the new agreement reached last weekend the euro will be saved. They must be the only ones left in Europe to believe so.

One hoped that the various decisions that have been taken over the past months managed to save Greece, but that hope has progressively been dwindling over the past days.

Only last Monday the IMF gave Greece an ultimatum to ramp-up budget austerity to win rescue funds and avert bankruptcy and eurozone turmoil early next month.

The IMF criticised Greece for wasting time, being behind schedule with privatization and for allowing reform momentum to slow down.

But it also forecast that the recession-hit economy will recover from wave after wave of crisis cutbacks and tax rises in 2013.

The International Monetary Fund’s representative to Greece, Bob Traa, said that more budget action was necessary.

The Greeks one meets come across as being certain Europe will not allow Greece to default. In these words one perceives that very Greek trait, hubris, that has brought that country to this brink: a refusal to do what needed to be done and an assurance that Europe will save Greece from the effects of its excesses. Even just for this reason, that is one very good reason why Greece must be allowed to default.

It is true that the banks in other countries have (culpably) lent huge sums of money to the Greek system which they knew was unsustainable. The banks, some of them very big, are now putting a lot of pressure on the German and French governments not to allow Greece to fail. In truth, what they are after is some kind of government intervention so that they, and not just Greece, do not fail.

But Europe and the eurozone must look wider, far wider, than that. So much money has been thrown at Greece but, millions of European citizens have made sacrifices to allow this to happen and they have not seen any eagerness by the Greeks to implement the reform packages which they committed to.

Other countries which have been hit by the economic crisis have reacted differently – Ireland had a problem as massive as the one that Greece has, yet the country has tackled the problem and is well on its way to regain growth. So too Portugal, and to a lesser degree, Spain. Italy is different: with a prime minister fighting off sex charges on a daily basis, he and his fractured government has no time for any form of plan to restore Italy’s competitiveness.

The risk is that all the money that has been spent to save Greece will just disappear with nothing to show for it, that the other countries of Europe, especially the profligate ones, are not chastened and thus do not return to orthodox and sane policies, and that a collapse of Greece, which today is looking highly probable, will be followed by the collapse of the entire eurozone.

For the sake of Europe, thus, for the sake of the euro, Greece must be allowed to fail. This is the reality, and we hope that when the House of Representatives has its anticipated debate on economic matters, the government side no longer repeats the Commission or ECB mantra that all will be well, but comes clean with the people of Malta and states things as they are.

More than that, it is essential that whoever represents Malta at the top meetings defends not just the narrow interest of Malta but more importantly the wider interests of the eurozone as a whole and joins those other representatives who are not letting the apparatchiks pull wool over their eyes.