Editorial

Beauty and ugliness are in the eye of the beholders. There are those who look at the European Union and see there nothing less than the Frankenstein monster. The anti-EU group, CNI, has waged war on this ogre. It plans to hold public meetings during the next phase of its campaign to expose the weaknesses and difficulties that confront the EU.

The Malta Labour Party has never acknowledged the CNI as its own. There were those who distanced themselves from the implacable hostility the organisation has towards the European Union. These fear that such an approach may have the opposite effect on the electorate, which has the opportunity to decide through the mechanism of a referendum to be held some time between now and next March in all probability, whether Malta should join or not.

CNI intends to focus on the reasons why Malta should not join and take as its reference the agreements being negotiated between the government and the EU.

When it is finally launched, the government's public relations campaign will need to take this negative influence into account without becoming totally absorbed by it. That campaign must have as its primary focus the benefits of membership at various levels of argument.

The next phase in the movement's campaign against membership comes at the same time that the leader of the opposition has expressed his personal view that the issue over membership and his own party's partnership proposal be shelved for a few years.

The time is fast approaching though when the negotiations are concluded and the electorate will be able to cast its vote in favour or against. Recent surveys indicate a majority in favour of membership. Government will want this majority to grow larger. CNI disagrees that such a majority exists. According to its findings (verifici), the majority are against membership. The next few months will ring with the sound of surveys.

The opposition leader, on the other hand, seems to have concluded that whatever the outcome, the result will not register with his party and will be ignored. He sees the future as being swayed by the outcome of the next general elections, which many believe will be held shortly after (two months?) the outcome of the referendum.

This explains in part the effort being made to have the visible deliverables in place by next March. These will, the government hopes, highlight its achievements.

CNI, on the other hand, will do its best to deflect public opinion away from these successes. It sees its task as bringing about a situation where the government will fail to reach its objective of taking Malta into the Union. Its leader maintains that for the referendum result to be acceptable, more than 50 per cent of all those eligible to vote must vote in favour.

There is no doubting CNI's determination to make things difficult for the government on the subject of membership. Nor is there any doubt that the government will achieve the desirable goal it and 10 other countries have set themselves in their national interest. Against the uncertainty which the stands taken by both the Labour Party and the CNI project, the electorate will choose the certainty which the government is offering through membership.