We happened to meet, people from the past, from the battles of the past years, from the battles of the 1980s against State-capitalism to the battles of the 1990s when the country seemed about to lose its bearings, to the 2000s when the country chose to hitch its caravan to the European Union and the euro.
We failed, we agreed. All our efforts were in vain. The Maltese nation is back where it was in the 1980s. It is absolutely not the case which party was in government, then and now. We could have had any administration as long as we registered a sensible improvement in our statehood. But we are back to where we were in those years.
And Europe has not helped at all. We can almost say we could have stayed out of the EU and no one would have seen any difference.
When, at the beginning of 1979 Eddie Fenech Adami saw the forthcoming 31 March and the end of the British military presence, he searched around for something that would give Malta stability and thought he found this in the EU. So began a huge effort to get Malta to join the EU. It was almost lost in 1996 when Helmut Kohl could not be persuaded to let us in and when the Maltese voted against VAT and cash registers but then, after just two years of the Sant government, and the collapse of the search for an alternative to VAT, and also because Dom Mintoff turned against his successor and brought down the government, the road to Europe was open.
The campaign prior to the EU referendum was long and harsh and, like anything in Malta, made it by the slightest of margins. Europe was the golden goal. People were persuaded that by not having to wait in queues like the citizens of third countries, and instead sail through borders, we became super-citizens.
But Europe, the EU, has not saved us from ourselves. It was never meant to save us from ourselves. When we joined the EU, we had to agree to an entire corpus of EU legislation, known as the ‘acquis communautaire’ but underneath all these laws, the structure of the Maltese state remained as it had always been ever since Independence – a country where the prime minister is the absolute monarch and where all institutions depend on his whim. A country with no checks and balances and where the judiciary willingly depends on the ruling executive.
The EU made Malta introduce an intermediate level, and the Maltese government obediently created all sorts of authorities, which were meant to ensure transparency and impartiality. But these authorities were set up by the same government and they soon became enclaves of government supporters. And they all fell under the same minister of the departments they were meant to oversee.
So at the end, under Eddie and under Gonzi as well as under Joseph Muscat, this EU-inspired reduplication of structures just added another tier to Malta’s prevailing bane – clientelism. The PN governments fostered clientelism in a big way, the Muscat government turned it into an art form.
The EU did nothing to correct this, as it has not corrected the fault lines of other member states. Look at what is happening in Hungary, in Poland, in Spain even.
In Malta’s case, we are facing what I am calling the ‘Azerbaijan-isation of Malta’. This is not just a reference to the country Azerbaijan, its banks, its links with specific Maltese PEPs, its top families and so on, but also to the correlations and similarities that speak of a strong government, a weak Opposition and the repression of civil society groups.
The correlations are clear: a government that was elected to power by a massive landslide and confirmed later by an even greater one, and an Opposition on its way to extinction, weak, riddled with internal feuds, sometimes too eager to appease.
The real Opposition are the small groups of courageous and inventive people who all come together in the remembrance of Daphne Caruana Galizia who, in death, is proving to be more devastating than when alive.
Like in Azerbaijan, the government will do its hardest to repress these groups and to smother any remembrance of opposition heroes like Daphne.
But if we want to find again the way we have lost, we cannot rely on the EU to do our dirty work (it is proving ineffective as it is) or on any other outside factor. To tackle the fault lines of our nation we cannot hope that one party replaces the other. We have to come up with real solutions that create checks and balances. We have to elect a government (and a prime minister) who willingly gives up all this absolute power he and his predecessors have carved out for themselves. This is what makes the battle for the seat of power such a do or die venture.
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