Last week, coinciding with the last day of the EPP congress in Malta, the government published statistics that showed that for the first time since 1981, Malta had registered a small - €9 million – surplus against the usual hundreds of millions of euros in deficit.

This it hailed, justifiably, as a huge success.

The success became even greater when the Leader of the Opposition made impromptu and apparently unscripted remarks when he was address in a group of young EPP supporters, making remarks that were later easily swatted away by the government – in particular that the 46% cut in capital expenditure in 2016 was due to the end of EU financing in 2015 but that contrary to what happened at the end of a previous cycle in 2010 when capital expenditure was roughly the same as that of 2016, the deficit in 2009 stood at €297 million as against the surplus of €8 million as registered in 2016.

There are questions that one must ask about the State’s finances in 2016 but these do not detract from what was a signal achievement of which the government is justifiably proud. In particular, recurrent expenditure has been increasing by some €200 million a year since 2012 but recurrent revenue has been increasing by a bigger sum each year.

We will come to this later.

The government finances figures are only a part of the picture. The overall picture is that of a booming economy whose growth has outstripped not just that of the EU as a whole but also of most member states.

The problem for the government starts now with all this focusing on the surplus. With an election coming on, this will inevitably spur bigger and bigger demands on the government by its grass roots to spend more and more. To employ more and more. To shell out increases all over the place even the most urgent and justifiable ones.

All this talk about the surplus, small though it is, has raised expectations sky-high and the government will find it hard to resist before the oncoming tidal wave of expectations especially from people who are living under or near the poverty line and who have not been greatly privileged by the Labour administration.

Some sane voices have already been raised urging the government to stick to its programme, not to give in to populist urges, and to put this and any eventual surplus in a fund to seed further growth rather than to squander this small, tiny, puny surplus.

It is usual in Malta for the economy to go haywire in election year and we then spend the successive years in penance for our splurge. We do hope this administration will do things differently.