Today’s national protest against corruption in Castille Square is nothing short of a clarion call to all citizens of Malta who hold not only good governance, but also their country, to heart.

And the fact that today’s protest has been organised by the opposition Nationalist Party, which has appealed to people to not unfurl party flags but, rather, the nation’s flag, is quite irrelevant.

That the Nationalist Party has chosen to strike while the iron is hot is a political inevitability. After all, the Panamagate scandal has shaken this government to its very core. From cafes to bus stops, and from boardrooms to shop floors, the words on everyone’s lips these days are ‘Panama’, ‘New Zealand’, ‘Mizzi’, ‘Schembri’, ‘Azerbaijan’, etc…

Today, the government that once campaigned so successfully on an anti-corruption platform is now getting a taste of its own medicine, and it is clearly a very bitter pill to swallow.

The last opportunity that the public had to vent its frustration against what it saw as a public administration rife with corruption was three years ago at the general election polls. And speak out they did, in the most unequivocal of ways – by handing the Nationalist Party the most staggering electoral defeat in the country’s political history.

Today, the people are being presented with another chance to voice their discontent, now that the tables have turned rather abruptly on the people who campaigned so vociferously for transparency and accountability.

This most recent Panamagate scandal has become this government’s litmus test. And those who had held out hope that this government would reform the way in which the country is governed are no doubt bitterly disappointed at its failure.

The 2013 general election was fought, by and large, on the battleground of good governance. The then Labour Opposition had declared a war on the corruption of the incumbent government and pledged to introduce the good governance, transparency and accountability that it said was so sorely lacking.

People flocked to the banner and the electorate swallowed those pledges hook, line and sinker – and swept the Labour Party to victory. Since then, things have taken a distinct turn for the worse. Virtually no section of the public service has been left untainted by allegations of cronyism, impropriety or some other kind of scandal. The house of cards built by the heavily campaigning Labour Party at the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013 appears to have lacked the glue to keep it bound together.

But the fact of the matter is that corruption had riddled practically every administration the country has seen, to one extent or another, and as such any citizen with any sense of civic responsibility has a duty to turn up in force to this afternoon’s protest. It is high time that the people hold its politicians accountable in every respect, irrespective of their political stripe – corruption does not recognise red or blue, the only colour it knows is the colour of money.

This issue goes beyond petty partisan politics; this is an issue that affects the very foundations of the nation. This is not a Nationalist Party protest, and it is hoped that the organisers’ gusto for this afternoon’s protest will be tempered to reflect just that.

But, having said that, it is undeniable that the government is skating on very thin ice indeed as far as the fight against corruption is concerned. Over the last three years the government has been hit, and hit hard, by one scandal after another.

Against this backdrop, the Nationalist Party recently unveiled the most wide-ranging set of proposals for good governance that the country has possibly ever seen. The PN left virtually no stone unturned in its bid to position itself as the party that will, at long last, instil good governance, political accountability and transparency in this country.

Some people may ask why the PN did not do all it is proposing today when it was in power. The answer is that today there is a new leader who clearly means business when it comes to good governance.

With that document, the Opposition set a new bar, a new standard that the government must rise to, lest it is to suffer the same fate it dealt to the Nationalist Party at the last general election, and with the same weapon.

The party showed its mettle against corruption even before that when it promptly dismissed two veteran PN politicians – Michael Falzon and Ninu Zammit – after this newspaper had published their involvement in the infamous global SwissLeaks scandal, in which they held secret and undeclared bank accounts in Switzerland when they were government ministers.

After the 2013 general election defeat so heavily tinged with allegations of corruption against the incumbent, and after the utter failing of this government to take corruption and good governance head-on, and not least with today’s demonstration the Opposition has, in a way, come full circle. And in the process it has pulled the good governance rug from under the government’s feet. With today’s protest, it clearly aims to up the ante. Both initiatives are highly commendable and welcome.

The people must send a clear message to the government that, to quote another famous protest of days gone by, ‘enough is enough’. They must tell the powers-that-be that the kind of behaviour they have witnessed is anything but acceptable.

After all this government, or any other government for that matter, will only react in the way it must if it is forced to do so by public outcry. And as such every decent citizen is obliged to cry out and to cry out loudly that they will no longer tolerate this kind of behaviour.

It is useless for the current government to keep harping on about how the last administration was corrupt; this government had already campaigned on that platform, and won that battle quite distinctly. The people spoke then, they want to speak again, and they must be heard.

But to be heard loud and clear they must send a crystal clear message that the government has two years left to clean up its act, or it will, most likely, be case of game over come the next general election.