Although a week has passed, comments and reverberations continue to echo with regards to what took place in Malta a week ago today when the Commission trooped to Malta at the beginning of the Maltese Presidency of the EU Council.

Now that it is over, we can look back and evaluate the speeches that were made and the implications.

Over the past days, these speeches have been the object of comments especially over the weekend.

We want to focus once again today on the speech made by the Leader of the Opposition in Parliament in the presence of Jean-Claude Juncker and Donald Tusk.

In another time, or maybe with another leader, we would have had another paean in honour of the EU. After all, it was the Nationalist Party that led Malta into the EU. Certainly in the past years there was no party so Euro-phile as the Nationalist Party of Malta.

No longer, it seems. Dr Busuttil launched into a direct attack on the Commission: guilty, as he saw it, of condoning corruption in its face.

Dr Busuttil, as we see it, was leading the Nationalist Party back to the nationalist line, rather than the EU line. If this is confirmed, and on Sunday Dr Busuttil repeated his criticism of the Commission, he is leading his party back to its nationalist roots.

One does not know if there is anything strategic in this shift. But certainly it is happening at a time when many countries, many peoples, are shifting to a Eurosceptic stance. The British people have expressed their euroscepticism in the Brexit referendum but the euroscepticism in the EU is on the increase.

There was much in Dr Busuttil’s short speech that was based on a purely Maltese context rather than what is happening around in the EU. But the cumulative impact is still the same. The PN has begun to shift into let’s say an EU-neutral stance and which may open to an anti-EU stance in the coming years.

This is or may be an epochal shift and just as a tanker takes time and space to turn around, so too a political party with a history such as the PN can only change its stance slowly and gradually.

In doing so, or rather if it does so, the PN may have opened up to that section of the electorate that was, is sceptical about the EU and which may be finding no space for it in the very euro-phile government of Joseph Muscat.

At the present time, there is no call to become rabid euro-sceptics, at least as this paper sees it, but surely it is a welcome change to learn to stand on our two feet and be more balanced, more even-keeled with regards to the EU decisions, critical when need be, supportive when need be.

After all, how is Malta to make its voice heard in the big EU? If it meekly goes along with anything and everything, people will tend to forget it is there. But if Malta were to occasionally object and stand firm, its voice will be heard more and its name noticed despite its small size.