All the recent indicators from the world's largest economies speak of the much-feared recession already lifting, with all sorts of green shoots appearing in most areas. The worst seems to have passed. It was at its worst from 14 September and the collapse of Lehman Brothers, to March, but now, with some slips along the way, it seems the dark clouds are lifting.

Barring a new catastrophe, it would seem that the world has narrowly avoided the collapse of whole economies and countries, with all the mayhem that would have brought about. Statistics in the US show that terms such as reconstruction and the like, used very rarely in January, are now in vogue all over the world.

Two swallows do not make a spring, so everything is still rather tentative, but since the whole crisis was mainly a crisis of trust, which when it went missing practically blocked all inter-bank exchanges, it appears that trust and confidence are returning.

Except in Malta, it seems.

It has often been explained that the Maltese economy seems to run counter to the world's tempo: it flourishes during wars but slumps during peacetime. This time, of course, the nature of things is quite different. As this paper has explained over the past months, while Malta has escaped the brunt of the recession so far, its main problems are self-inflicted - the deficit and inflation.

That will inevitably lead us to suffer more and more when the tail end of the recession really hits us - in lost exports, less tourist numbers and spend - we will be too frail to withstand the wave. We just don't have the money to do whatever is necessary and we seem to have lost the nerve to really tackle the most crucial areas of our economy, specifically government expenditure.

Unless things change, therefore, the coming months will see the international economies rise up like the phoenix from the ashes of recession while we slide and struggle in the throes of our peculiar demons. The coming, post-recession world will be ruthless, it will have no time or patience to waste on those still struggling with recession.

Of course, there are at least two sides to every story. While on the one hand we have a government that is not at all clear on what really matters and clear on what needs to be done, we also have an Opposition that for many, many reasons aims at one thing only: to do a re-run of last year's election, which it thought it had won but which it lost.

Hence, the onslaught on whatever needed to be done, right or wrong, complicit a media that has completely forgotten any sense of fairness or responsibility and which refuses to think without blinkers.

Looking over the past months, one cannot but be struck with how the right decisions were taken - on the dockyard, on the electricity rates as well - and it will be only in the coming months that the correctness of such decisions will, hopefully, be appreciated. Oil prices are rising again, as they inevitably would, and as the world's economy comes out of the slump, hence the absolutely important policy stance of pricing consumption rather than encouraging it, and of getting the country to recover what it spends to import oil. Hence the importance, also emphasized by this paper over and over again, of spending on clean energy sources likes the wind or the sun.

Nevertheless, the country still finds itself at the mercy of structural causes that are causing the deficit to grow out of control. The country now faces, the only eurozone member of this week's bunch, EU disciplinary procedures. No one seems to have thought to explain to the people what this could mean - a hefty fine we have to pay for out of our pockets.

Time and again the lesson is clear: what is needed is clear thinking and action in time. It also requires patient and clear, hopefully not acrimonious or partisan, explanation, even in the face of undoubtedly keen opposition.

The country cannot be run on principles such as "Hang the deficit, jobs come first". This is quite the wrong approach for many more reasons than can be explained here. The deficit matters. To defer tackling the deficit will only mean losing more jobs in the long run. Government means seeking balance in the first place and a balance must be found, but to neglect tackling the deficit will unbalance the whole economy.

This does not mean urging the government to be arrogant, far from it. Nor does it mean becoming callous about pain and unemployment, far from it too. It is possibly just an impression, but one could be pardoned for thinking that the coming EP elections are also important for the government, as it offers it a re-run of those terrible days last year. Does this mean the government too thinks its victory was too flimsy and shaky?

It has sometimes been said that it's politics that bedevil Malta. Here we are on the eve of an election that matters not a whit, getting all worked up on just five seats in a Parliament of 740. Let's wager that the country with the least seats will also be the country with the highest turnout on 6 June. And while it is acceptable, and more, for the Opposition to turn the contest into a battle for votes, the government is there to govern, or so we thought. There are so many decisions to take, and not taking them, or even postponing them just until the EP election is over, could mean missing the bus.

There are also many other things to do, decisions to take that should be taken now and which will not affect in any way the 6 June vote. The suspicion is that in so many areas the government is stymied into inaction not because it's afraid of losing votes but because it knows not otherwise.

Lastly, the immigrants' saga. Even here, we have an Opposition that is making the same noises as right-wing Berlusconi, even though the Vatican and the UN have rightly condemned him. Mainly due to its ineptness, the government has failed to adequately reply to the many accusations made by Italy, nor to show that its refusal to send the immigrants back to Libya whence they come comes from a higher view of man than that which seems to inspire Berlusconi and Maroni. But then, if we are to have such a higher moral ground, why the ineptness and the inadequate treatment we reserve for them in the closed and open centres?

Malta deserves a better set of politicians than the present squabbling lot.