We had not heard the word for quite a while.

It was mentioned only once in the Budget speech last Monday, but it was enough to spark its use.

“Our heart was, still is and will remain socialist,” Finance Minister Clyde Caruana declared in his opening remarks before presenting the list of measures the government is planning for 2023. His colleagues, including the Prime Minister, banged hard on the parliamentary desks when they heard him say that phrase.

It was an intended message, certainly not a slip of the tongue. It was also strategically placed at the beginning of the minister’s Budget speech, when those following the proceedings were still listening attentively and had not yet been lost in the exercise which, once again, dragged on for too long.

That quote was the one that was picked up the most in Labour circles, with Caruana himself using it to publicise the Budget speech on his Facebook page. Photos then started to appear on social media, showing Prime Minister Robert Abela sitting with a half-smile in Parliament, with the citation pasted next to his face.

Other Labour officials have used it over the past week. It was as if they were waiting for someone to set the ball rolling to go back to publicly endorse the socialism they had never abandoned, but which they had jealously retained in their heart for years, if not decades.

Even the choice of words by the minister made it clear that, deep down, the Labour Party never pulled away from its socialist roots; the only difference was that it stopped highlighting them. Now Labour thinks it is time to bring socialism back.

All throughout these years, the use of the term had been discontinued because it brought back too many dark memories. With regard to Malta, it was a reminder of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when socialism was associated with repression and violence, when unemployment was high, when food was scarce and when we were closer to authoritarian countries than what was then known as Western Europe.

As time goes by, fewer and fewer people remember those eras. People younger than 50 probably have no recollection whatsoever. On the rock we live in, there are more people who do not remember those times than there are people who do.

Labour now seems comfortable enough, or feels strong enough, to bring socialism back. It was revived in the Budget possibly to test the waters and then gauge the reaction. It wrapped the ideology nicely in a Budget with a record Cost of Living Adjustment and other measures to sustain the needy.

The way government is presenting socialism, is not “the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy”, as Winston Churchill once described it. In Caruana’s words, it is Labour’s “social conscience”, one which means Labour does not accept “point blank what others are doing”, but one which “takes decisions according to the country’s specific needs”.

To be fair, socialism has not gone away in these years, in spite of it not getting frequent mentions. And in Europe, the ideology is rearing its head again, probably to combat the rise, at the other end of the political scale, of the right wing.

In the years that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, socialism took a big hit. But politics, like most other things in life, works in cycles. For every action, there is a reaction, and it was only a matter of time that the upswing of right wing politics would eventually be countered by an upsurge of the left. It’s happening all over Europe, where the poles are getting further apart and it’s becoming harder for those who sit around a large table in Brussels to come to terms on the way forward, given their ideological differences.

To be fair, again, in Malta even Nationalist governments adopted and implemented policies that were by and large leftist in nature. “Biex hadd ma jibqa’ lura” (no-one should be left behind) is a slogan that has been used by different PN leaders and there is nothing more socialist than trying to lift up the people in the bottom rungs of the social scale.

Time will tell whether we will start hearing Labour politicians using “socialist” and “socialism” again more frequently. Like his predecessor Joseph Muscat, current Labour Prime Minister and leader Robert Abela so far prefers to use “progressive”, a term that he mentioned more than once in the press conference that followed the Budget speech.

Some would argue that the term “progressive” was created as a substitute for extreme socialism or communism. But let’s not go there, as otherwise we would be accused of scaremongering.

We will know more about government’s socialist intentions on Tuesday, when Abela will be delivering his reply to the Opposition Leader’s criticism.

Will Abela mention “socialism”?