It has been a long time since Malta has had such a bad press as it is having now over the sale-of-Maltese-passports scheme. Prime Minister Joseph Muscat does not like it one bit and neither does the rest of Malta.
It is not pleasant seeing one’s country being ridiculed in the way some major international media organisations have been doing over the past few days.
What is most intriguing though is the way the Prime Minister is arguing. He has been reported saying: “We should be united and should never accept the trashing of our country.”
What is Dr Muscat suggesting? Building a wall around the island so that the foreign media, governments and organisations would not be able to pry into the island’s domestic affairs? Or that those who believe the scheme is bad come out publicly supporting it to avoid seeing Malta fall into disrepute?
If the foreign media has ridiculed the citizenship scheme, the blame for this ought to be put squarely on the government and nobody else.
All this can be put down to inexperience in administration and, in some aspects, hard-headedness.
What is greatly surprising is how the government thought it could get away with it when communications today could throw any domestic affair into the international limelight in seconds.
Domestic affairs are under constant scrutiny. Take the island’s relations with the European Union, for example. Being a member State, the affairs of this country are constantly minutely monitored and regularly assessed to ensure that Malta conforms to the rules and regulations set by Brussels.
Even the government’s budget is scrutinised. If the European Commission finds that its own projections are at variance with those of the government, it will say so, as it has just done in the case of the Budget for next year.
What this means is that the country’s finances, and so many other matters, as well, are under constant scrutiny and the Administration cannot afford to slip without attracting the Commission’s attention. In other words, a government is now constrained to be far more careful than ever before in the drawing up of its financial estimates.
However, besides the Commission, there are also the credit rating agencies that keep a sharp eye on what is happening. These do not usually mince words, as the country has experienced so many times already.
Whatever faults they may have, their reports still draw considerable attention and analysis. There is then the International Monetary Fund, which regularly analyses the economic situation.
Through the European Court of Human Rights, and as a result of the number of cases Malta has lost before it, the people have become more aware of their rights. This has put, or ought to put, increasing pressure on local courts to fall in line with new case law.
So, if Malta gets bad press for something that is considered really bad or out of synch with what is normal practice, the fault for it is invariably ours. This places increasing responsibility on the Administration, the judiciary and on all bodies that are key players in the country’s affairs to ensure they act correctly and, in the case of the government, not to come out with half-baked ideas.
Finally, it is good to see the government realising it made a mistake and is now engaged in talks with the Opposition with a view to seeing how they could come up with a modified citizenship scheme that makes sense.