The fashion in political discourse in Europe currently is to focus on populism. The topics that recur are: events in Hungary and in the so-called Visegrad group; the strange presidential election now taking place in Austria; the electoral progress of parties like the National Front in France; and Donald Trump's success as of now, in the US presidential campaign.

Populists are being projected as a huge threat to pluralistic democracy, as indeed they are in a certain way. They draw too much on people's anger, offer too many over-simplistic solutions.

But they ride on crises which the "traditional" parties have allowed to spread and deepen. They have failed to respond adequately to problems that are really bothering many people. Rightly or wrongly, populists address these problems and seek to respond to them in their own manner.

Even when voters do not believe that populist solutions are viable, they still give populists credit for having joined them to face up to the difficulties they are encountering.

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Lost days

This month of May in Belgium I was reminded of the "lost" days: these past two weeks workers and employees there benefitted from three holidays that are not observed in Malta: the Ascension, Pentecost and the First of May. The first two are religious holidays; as the First of May this year came on a Sunday, the Friday that immediately followed was a holiday in Belgium.

Many of the controversies that erupted in Malta when such holidays were removed are today forgotten. When the Labour government of the seventies increased the number of obligatory holidays for workpeople, it also reduced the number of religious holdays observed in mid-week. Hell broke loose. The then Nationalist Opposition promised to restore the "lost" holidays, along with a practice by which when a holiday happens on a Saturday or Sunday, an extra workday is allowed off.

Post 1987, that is what it did. But some years later the same government changed its mind and retracted the measures, basically on the same grounds as those proclaimed by the Labour administration: to improve productivity.

It was strange to discover that our discarded policies regarding public holidays are still alive and well in Belgium.

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Civil society

Many people have the wrong idea as to what constitutes civil society and what it consists of.

They seem to consider it as a network of people who get together and assemble sometimes here, sometimes there, around some particular slogan. They can also in this view, nowadays mobilise more swiftly via social media.

However, to a large extent, civil society consists of members of organizations and institutions which, while not benefitting from state power, concentrate on an ongoing activity, in order to safeguard the economic, social and cultural interests of their individual members.

When and as they mobilise, they do it to confront circumstances that they consider to be a real or potential threat to their operations and existence.