Around this time nine years ago, when Alfred Sant called an early election, PN leader Eddie Fenech Adami had to be practically sat upon before he was finally persuaded to offer an apology to voters for the PN’s arrogance pre-1996 which had cost him that election.
It was tough for the PN leader, but in the end he did it – and it worked.
This time around, it is Labour’s turn to apologise – for leading the people astray by opposing EU membership. That, anybody at any level except the grassroots freely admits today, was the wrong approach.
Today, Malta is comfortably integrated in the EU. Labour itself has three MEPs in Strasbourg to the PN’s two. Labour has accepted the first big direct result of membership – the euro – and no one, bar a fringe, seriously thinks we must exit the EU.
Most of the dire predictions made by Labour to scare off people have not come true – not the loss of sovereignty (not that we had much of it before), nor of national identity, nor the calamities forecast by none other than the Labour leader himself on countless factories and industries. True, some have closed down and people lost their jobs, but there has been no spike in unemployment. The economy itself, which was widely forecast to go into a slump, has meanwhile flourished as the deficit was brought down to far more manageable levels (although more must be done) enabling Malta to join the eurozone.
Joining the EU has not turned out to be as traumatic as Labour made it out to be, certainly not as traumatic as that evening when Labour said it had won the referendum and people poured into the streets, from opposing sides. We have not been inundated by Sicilians (though we have by illegal immigrants) nor have people come and taken up jobs off the Maltese (not even the illegal immigrants because, had they to suddenly evaporate, all our construction work, and street cleaning, would go up in smoke).
Simply sweeping the issue under the carpet will just not work. Come the last, decisive, weeks of the campaign, the Labour leadership will be plagued by questions such as: Do you believe you were right in 2003 or not? Had you to relive those days would you still go for No? And if so, what are you doing now trying to be voted into power to govern an EU member State?
Had there been a change in the leadership, such a huge tectonic shift could have been more easily managed. As things are, the party having chosen, as is its right, to retain the same leader, such a shift, or U-turn, is damned hard to manage.
Unless, that is, the party and its leadership apologise and thus recover lost ground and hopefully those who abandoned party allegiances in 2003. It’s always difficult to apologise and painful too but there seems no other way out. The party must face up, calmly and serenely, to its past and have the moral strength to acknowledge past mistakes, like anyone else.
For lurking in the undergrowth there is a further basic question people will ask come election time: which is the party that can better administer Malta inside the EU?
As this edition of the newspaper can confirm, the present government is turning out to be very shaky coping with EU membership. The chaos and delay in setting up the all-important paying agency in the Ministry of Agriculture is just one example. So too the huge number of infringements Malta is facing. The lack of take-up of signal EU funds such as FP7 and Comenius. And, above all, the lack of take-up of the EU posts reserved for Maltese citizens and the lack of contribution by Maltese citizens to the pan-EU debate.
Even more, people will want to know if by voting Labour in, so recently eurosceptic, and thereby losing the services of the few who have made Malta less of a disaster than it could have been, will we, in the end, be better off or not? This does not mean that Labour does not have the brains – we just ask if real preparations are being made to enable a Labour government to take up the onus of EU membership, not least in the amount of travel that consumes so much of ministers’ time, competence at the higher levels, and at long last some real take-up of the EU posts that were always available but untaken, except for the ubiquitous translation jobs.
In the coming election it is simply not true there will not be the EU factor, for the simple reason that Labour has stopped opposing it and we’re in the EU anyway. The EU factor will be there in so many unsuspected ways. There is no time like the present to tackle it head on.