A year ago today – the culmination of a bruising election campaign. The tension. Then, next day, a year ago tomorrow, the tremendous tension, the whispers, the rumours. And then, at 2am the next day – that’s Tuesday a year ago – the final result.

Today, therefore, is the time to look back and to reflect. With a year’s hindsight, things look very different now from how they looked a year ago.

A year ago, the country believed the PN had won. Today, many people are coming to realise that a year ago the PN did not lose enough votes to lose the election – although it lost 13,000 from the previous election – and that Labour did not win enough votes to win them the election.

There’s a big difference between winning and not losing enough – a difference this government did not understand then, nor does it understand today; hence all its present problems.

Believing it won the election, this government proceeded to act big and strong when actually it was, and still is, weak – terribly, conclusively, weak. It boasts that it has “two strong hands” but forgets it has feet of clay.

Being weak, it should have sought out agreement and compromise. Instead, it acted big, went its own way, and imposed its will. To be fair, it also found an Opposition equally bent on confrontation, still feeling sore after the fourth defeat in a row. Yet the government never told its people they had not won, but barely escaped losing. So, breaking a clear election commitment, it went on and continued to appoint its own blue-eyed boys to anything that moved. It shunned the accepted and hallowed practice of the European Union and the Commission in consultation, consultation, consultation at each and every step of a decision process.

Being weak, it should have sought to command as wide a consensus as possible within the parliamentary group. Instead, it opted to carry out a full-scale cull of past ministers, parliamentary secretaries and wannabes, thus creating the most fractious and disaffected backbench in recent political history.

Then it thought it had found the philosophers’ stone and went for a tight and small Cabinet. A year on, it must be clearly stated here that the choice has some serious flaws in it and the sooner there is a

reshuffle, the better. The past year has seen some very serious breaches of ministerial collective responsibility, some in public, without so much as a protest or scolding: ministers speaking ill of their predecessors and even of their ministerial colleagues.

There are ministers and there are ministers. Some have barged their way around, leaving many to wonder that if they can do that when their government is so weak, what would they do if it were any stronger? In some cases, the Prime Minister, not for the first time, had to intervene and somehow bring things back to the negotiating table, leaving the Cabinet member fuming and sulking and no doubt feeling undermined by his own chief.

The first year has been spent, in the minds of the government, doing the things that needed to be done and that will get more and more difficult later on in the legislature. Apart from the method used, it was right to tackle the dockyard issue. Then, when the transport workers dementedly went out on strike and brought Malta to the verge of total breakdown, it was good to tackle the public transport issue, though so far nothing concrete has been done.

Then the credit crunch and the international crisis took centre stage. This paper consistently supported the government in seeking to bring the country’s finances to the deficit levels to which it had committed itself to the rest of the union and also to recoup the outlays on fuel importation which shows that all the best-planned decision processes can still come a cropper. Who would have thought that when oil was $140 a barrel and everyone feared it would go up to $200, it would come down to $40 and less?

As this paper said last week, a concurrent issue was in respect of Enemalta’s cost recovery and capital programme. The Prime Minister said on Friday that maybe the government could have better explained its decision to hike the electricity rates and surcharge. It goes deeper than that. Anyone who goes around the party’s clubs on a Sunday, like he does, could spend a few minutes in the bar and would then hear how the party’s hard core has not understood the government’s decisions and how many have been badly hit. The same goes for the retailers, another core group of supporters. Acting big and then being so weak has wrecked social cohesiveness and turned the country against its government.

The government keeps trying to persuade the country that Malta has escaped the brunt of the recession and will come out of it mostly unscathed. That is too premature. The recession tsunami will really hit the shores of these islands from summer onwards, and people must not be left living an illusion.

Malta is today, more than yesterday, an open economy and no amount of protective measures can defend us from the waves that will come. It was right that we joined the euro but that alone will not protect us. The government is right to tackle the industries that are thinking of closing up and relocating by additional help. More must be done to attract to Malta business that is being lost to other countries such as Ireland.

But a very strong word of warning here: April’s G20 meeting is expected to address proposals for tighter financial regulation. Despite so much effort, Malta is still, and unfairly, treated as a tax haven. Besides, Malta through its financial services and its online betting sites, etc., now manages assets that may be larger than the country’s GDP. Can the government reassure the country that no toxic assets lurk in these funds, that no fund domiciled in Malta is being investigated elsewhere, that no public figure/s may be touched by any such investigation?

The recent Commission report on Malta strongly emphasises the need to tackle the expenditure side of the government. It is clear that this is by far the most important issue the government needs to face. All that we seem to hear at ground level are complaints that the hospital service cannot operate for lack of funds, ditto ADT to do the roads, ditto culture in general. Ditto for people on the breadline. At the same time, government keeps enlarging the various authorities that employ so many of its supporters in mostly sinecure jobs. Something’s gotta give.

More things have gotta give in non-economic issues. The flow of illegal immigrants has now become a tsunami in its own right and from being the pet hate of loonies has now become a mainstream issue. The government has no position to speak of except for continuing to take them in and then relegating them to leaky tents “to send a message”, apart from weakly bleating that the EU must do more.

This is completely unacceptable and is, and will be, the source of much political mischief. The people expect the government to come up with a solution – for that’s how people have come to look upon the government. If the government does not have a solution, at least one that appears as such in the eyes of the Maltese, the government has run its course.

The second non-economic issue is the state of Maltese society and the role of the church in it. Possibly the biggest issue facing the Nationalist Party is how to move from being a party closely aligned to the church, a Christian-democrat party, to a party that reflects the changes in Maltese society. Does the party in government still think people do not notice the stranglehold exercised by an increasingly militant church very much in decline? When will the party have the courage to stand on its own feet without the need of the church’s crutches?

Doing things, as the Prime Minister listed on Friday, is simply not enough. If the party in government intends to not just preserve the slim majority it won by the skin of its teeth a year ago today, but also to recuperate the 13,000 majority it lost, doing things is not enough. It must be humble enough to acknowledge its inherent weakness, which was exemplified perhaps by the humiliation of having the two major projects concerning Valletta – the St John’s museum and the Palace Square car park – thrown out in the same fortnight.