Not many European People’s Party (EPP) power-holders can be jumping for joy that their new Secretary-General has declared he is going to turn himself into a Maltese falcon focusing on the smallest EU member state with the smallest EPP member party. The reason is obvious: there are so many bigger – and certainly more worrying – elements in the EPP itself that need to be monitored and checked as they continue to flout EU directives and regulations, even treaties that do not fit their populist agendas.

While Malta has, over the years, graciously and positively received her assorted EU, EP and CoE delegations, many of them led by ego-loving individuals with a penchant for political contradictions and even barefaced lies, to discuss issues concerning the rule of law, its judicial system, the financial services sector, etc., the new EPP Secretary-General will have to tackle – one assumes on a daily basis if he is to do the good job that is  expected of him, hotter events and more serious developments occurring in countries where EPP parties are in power or in shared government which will inevitably take more of his time and energy.

Or is the EPP – which has given Simon Busuttil this political appointment and, in so doing, taking him out of his partisan misery – disinterested in acting like a falcon in places like Poland (where judicial independence has become an unsavoury joke), ultra-rightist Viktor Orban’s Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and elsewhere within the European Union where the dark face of populism has been the key to temporarily stalled electoral accomplishment?

While Malta has been happily growing economically but still playing her agreed part on such delicate issues as migration, the so-called Visegrad Group simply do not want to know. Long may our Archbishop appeal from Bari. They refuse to play their part, despite having once signed a treaty to share in this immense human burden that is bound to get bigger as the conflicts in Syria and Libya continue to intensify.

Now the new EPP Secretary-General wants to cast his hawk eyes on Malta, at least according to his swansong speech in the Maltese Parliament last Tuesday, while the rest of Europe grapples with the huge waves of social and ideological discontent and the Brexit blues, particularly in France where the flames now threaten the second largest economy in the EU.

Busuttil, whose only claim to political success was the 2003 EU accession referendum the result of which even my pet cat Pippin had predicted with 100% precision, may end up wearing an oversize cap that could easily drop down to his eyebrows if he thinks that his role within the EPP is merely that of a Maltese falcon. As a fellow Maltese I can only wish him success, as I am wishing Pete Buttigieg in the US after all, but to unprejudiced EPP minds his record is not exactly made of scintillating stuff.

He had had a hand in the 2008 electoral manifesto which eventually kept the Nationalist Party, an EPP Party member, in power as a minority government hanging on by its fingertips, he was deputy leader when the Party lost the 2013 election by an awesome majority and then, as leader of that same EPP Party, he lost by an even bigger and historic majority in 2017: definitely much to be bitter about.

Since then, he has laid a-not-so-subterfuge siege to his successor in the Party, expecting the party faithful to join his undermining campaign – which they failed to do on three consecutive occasions. Now he is jumping off that wobbly bandwagon to ride the pan-European EPP machine which has more than enough problems within itself to concentrate on a tiny member state that has, undeniably, been willing to change things that had been considered acceptable for donkey’s years but which suddenly became a ‘preoccupation’.

Even now, it is willingly – if not subserviently – streamlining procedures like the appointment of a new Police Commissioner when it is known that Police Commissioners everywhere else in the rest of the EU (Germany’s Interior Minister has just appointed new heads of the country’s domestic intelligence agency and the Federal Police Force) are still appointed by either the Prime Minister or the Minister for the Interior, with the exception of Italy – which leaves it to the President of the Republic in consultation with, guess who, the Prime Minister.

There is the inevitable temptation among many Maltese to think they are being bullied into situations which, somehow, are not fashioned for other member states with the same issues. And then you find people who wonder why the Brits chose to leave the EU and why growing movements in other nations – such as France, Sweden, Finland and the Czech Republic – may one day demand to do the same.

But then, the Maltese Falcon will be there not to heal the EPP’s troubled soul or soothe the EU’s present woes, but to keep its fangs aimed at Malta where a popular, democratically-elected government has been changing – and continues to change – what is deemed worth changing, and where EU survey after EU survey has decreed how satisfied and economically optimistic the island’s citizens are.

Brilliant ideas have already been proposed by the falcon as he flies off, however, like naming a parliamentary chamber to only one political “martyr” when there have been at least three.

                                     

...and a British lioness

Just out of the European Union’s clasps, and brimming with new neo-colonial fervour, a British Member of Parliament, Debbie Abrahams, has been demanding – not asking, of course – that she be allowed an entry visa to India as if we are still living in the age of the British Raj.

The lioness was outraged when she was denied entry to the former British colony over a revoked visa following her criticism of Delhi’s policies in Kashmir. She was quickly put in her place, however, being reminded by sundry officials and bloggers that India is no longer a UK subject and that, after 14 August 1947, entering the sub-continent ceased to be a ‘right’ for the Brits.

This kind of colonial hangover is not peculiar to the British, of course. There is always a whiff of it when pompous European heads of delegations descend upon the smaller EU nations to demand, dictate and judge, expecting them to fold up and bow in submission to their verdicts. Messengers from ex-colonial powers such as France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal and Germany are susceptible to the adoption of this obsolete attitude.

The Maltese have the perfect proverb to describe them: allaħares il-ġemel jara ħotobtu għax jaqa’ u jmut zopptu which, literally translated, says: were the camel to see its hump, it would instantly drop dead.