In my first column after the last general election (March 21), I pointed out how, in recent years, the Malta Labour Party looked particularly at the UK and France for stimulation. I drew attention to Josè Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's initiatives and style as worthy of interest. Since then, the new leader of the MLP, Joseph Muscat, has also indicated the Spanish Socialists as one source of his aspiration to lead a coalition of progressives and moderates.
Today I would like to indicate another social democrat movement worth studying more closely. It is another American party - only this time, Latin American.
The Workers' Party of Brazil, led by Luiz Lula da Silva (popularly known simply as Lula), has come a long way since it was shunned by middle-class voters and made economists and financial observers nervous that its election to office would be disastrous for the country. Soon to be 63, President Lula started life as a shoeshine boy just having moved to the sprawling city of Sao Paolo. Street-wise with no formal education, against all odds he worked his way up to become President of Brazil in 2002. And since then has won re-election. On both occasions, in the run-off he won at least 60 per cent of the vote.
The choice of Brazil as a country to watch out for may strike some readers as strange. It is true that the country is a regional giant. One can travel within Brazil and cover distances longer than that between the Vatican and the Kremlin. On one occasion I sailed 2,000 miles down the Amazon only to realise that I had barely started my adventure. Brazil is afflicted by poverty and illiteracy. Agricultural policy and land reform concern a major segment of the country's politics and economy - in a way that they do not in Malta.
Admittedly, the country has long been tipped by international observers as a slumbering giant. It has often been selected, alongside China and India, as a future major global player. But these predictions have had to put up with the sardonic joke that Brazilians liked to crack about themselves: "Brazil is the country of the future - and always will be!"
However, that joke may be about to become dated. In recent years and months, Brazil has been re-branding itself: from the land of hyperinflation to the land getting wealthy on biofuels.
Its progress has been significant enough that, last week, at the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation's conference in Rome, Brazil was one of the countries being criticised for its role in the explosion of food prices. Its sugar plantations are being used to produce the biofuel, ethanol.
President Lula's reply was sharp. He pointed out that the price of sugar had remained relatively stable. That only around one per cent of Brazil's arable land was given to the production of biofuels.
Instead of blaming the shift in production - from cereals for food to cereals for fuel - President Lula said the causes to be underlined were two.
First, one had to distinguish between the poor of the world. There are those whose lives are getting better thanks to globalisation and those whose lives are getting worse. The rising standard of living of some of the world's poor means that they are eating more food, especially more meat.
The problem of hunger for the remaining poor was not food shortages, he said, but inadequate incomes.
And, he went on, if their incomes are inadequate, the blame must fall on the North, whose agricultural subsidies and protectionism have destroyed many local markets. He also accused US producers of biofuels for being very wasteful. They divert maize and other crops from food production.
President Lula's brand of social democracy is worth studying further for reasons to do with both domestic economic policies and international initiatives.
His government has pursued a domestic policy that combines economic development with ecological awareness. Brazil has developed an expertise in ecological products that it can sell. In doing so, it improves the lives of some of the most needy in society.
Moreover, President Lula combines a passion for social justice and solidarity with a commitment to free markets. Indeed, he has said that it is the absence of real free global markets - given the protectionism of the US and EU - that is making the life of the world's poor worse than it could be.
Finally, his Workers' Party could be an important partner for the Party of European Socialists in the making of a fairer, more peaceful world. "Looking at the lead of this other America" may soon acquire a new meaning.
Dr Attard Montalto is a Labour member of the European Parliament.