All’s well that ends well, as Shakespeare would have said.

Both parties are claiming victory, but in different ways. The fact of the matter is that the Labour Party and the Nationalist Party have both lost something after the conclusion of talks between the European Commission and the government on the notorious citizenship scheme.

Of course, the bigger loser by far is the government, which has had to bow to the EC’s strong pressure and has had to reluctantly accept to include a residency clause in the scheme. It had vehemently resisted this idea, one which had been fervently advocated by the Nationalist Party, but ultimately the government had to give in to avoid facing legal action it knew it would have lost. The government’s surrender is ample proof that it has realised that it has no legal grounds on which to stand.

On its part, the Nationalist Party has lost the trump card it had up its sleeve between now and the general election. If no agreement had been reached, if the government had remained stubborn in its stand against including a residency clause and if Malta had ended up at the European Court of Justice with all the international shame it would have brought with it, the PN would have had something with which it could have lashed out at its political adversaries. That trump card has now been taken away.

The Nationalist Party may have secretly hoped that the government would have ploughed on with the original scheme and clashed head-on with European institutions. A few weeks ago, I wrote that the citizenship scheme could have turned out to be the PN’s way of turning the tide in its favour just as much as the honoraria issue in the previous legislature was the first major step towards Labour’s emphatic victory in the last election. That has now been taken away from the PN.

What’s funny is that the PL and the PN are now attacking each other using the same words and phrases – the PL says the PN is panicking and isolated and the PN says it is the PL which is... well, panicking and isolated. They should try to be more original.

If anything, the question is why it took so long – and here, to be fair, the blame lies solely on the government and its hard-headedness – for Joseph Muscat and his colleagues to see reason. The negative publicity that Malta earned in the last four months is inestimable and will be hard to erase, and this could easily have been avoided if the necessary corrections to the original scheme were made immediately, before the law was passed in Parliament.

But the government thought it could bulldoze its way through the House thanks to its large majority, probably underestimating the backlash it would have to face not only from the Opposition and the public in general, but also on the international platform. As it happened, the government was forced to revise its position three times to: 1) remove the secrecy clause; 2) add property/investment to the list of requirements needed for foreigners to purchase a Maltese passport; and 3) include the obligation of residency for potential buyers.

And, while in the first two instances it may appear that they were issues that the government had pre-empted and which it planned to use as bargaining chips to be seen as giving up something, it never intended to accept the third. The government had adopted an “over-my-dead-body” stand on the inclusion of a residency requirement, and would not have changed it were it not for the crushing defeat it suffered in the European Parliament and the position taken by the European Commission, which included warnings of legal action against Malta.

What the government was forced to do by the Commission is not a “minor change”, as Joseph Muscat is trying his best to make us believe. The inclusion of the residency clause means that the government has lost its main argument. At the end of the day it had to give in. It says that it did so because it is a government that listens but, in this case, it is more of a government that did not want to listen but buckled under the pressure. If that is not humble pie, I don’t know what is.

The PL is contending that, after all, what has been imposed on the Maltese government by the Commission is not a five-year residency as the PN was insisting but just one year. But whether it’s just one day or 100 years, the Labour government has lost the argument on this. It is rich on Labour’s part to say that it had to reach agreement with the EC because it could not come to terms with the PN, when the accord reached with Europe was the same in concept as that proposed right from the start by the Nationalist Party.

The PL might be able to sell what it says is a victory to the gullible and blinkered, but it will not wash with those who can think with a mind of their own. Locally, it can boast of bringing in one billion euros – and, just a small note to the PM, we know that one billion means a thousand million, so you do not have to condescendingly spell it out every time as if you were talking to a bunch of idiots – but Malta’s reputation has suffered tremendously from what has been labelled as the prostitution of a country. The loss of face will cost us more than the one billion the scheme will bring in.

Having said all this, the citizenship scheme is far from being a subject that is closed. The details of the agreement reached with the EC are still to be published and, beyond that, I am sure that there will be other developments that will grab the headlines.

Shakespeare would have had to find another title.

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