The news in Malta this week has been dominated by the headlines about migrants. It is worth looking beyond our shores to this week’s events in Egypt, though. They might seem removed from our preoccupations. But if the political instability in Egypt continues, its consequences may show up in Malta as further migrant arrivals.

It is difficult to underestimate the significance of what happened in Cairo on Monday. A few days after the Islamist President Mohamed Morsi was removed from office by the army, in the name of popular demand, several of his Muslim Brotherhood supporters staged a sit-in outside the Republican Guard club.

What happened next is subject to conflicting accounts. The Muslim Brotherhood claims that a massacre followed the dawn prayers. The army rebuts that it faced a terrorist attack. The Egyptian media have not challenged the army’s account but then it largely took an anti-Morsi stance from the beginning of the mass protests against him a few weeks ago.

The only major channel supporting the Muslim Brotherhood version is Al-Jazeera, with vivid images of Brotherhood supporters drenched in blood.

However, Al-Jazeera is said to be distrusted by many Egyptians, which see it as a mouthpiece for Qatar, the country that has most supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

Whatever the cause, the result is there to see: 50 dead; 300 wounded. The deadliest clash of the last two and a half years.

Indeed, more people have been killed in two weeks of protests than in a year under the Islamist President.

Can this possibly be a sign that things are getting better or more democratic or, perhaps, that Egypt is embarked on a process of reform that would eventually make it a stable democracy?

It would take a brave optimist to make that wager. At first, it might seem like a natural conclusion to make. Upon reflection, however, serious worries set in.

There is no doubt that President Morsi was taking steps that were eroding the hopes that had been kindled with Egypt’s revolution in 2011. In a year he moved from promising to be a President of all Egyptians to making narrow ideological decisions, postponing important reforms and making dubious alliances.

For example, he appointed as governor of Luxor, an important tourist area, a member of an extremist Islamist group. Given the tensions between such groups and tourist culture, the implications for the tourist economy in the area were not good, at least in purely economic terms.

Egypt, suffering from economic reversals, is also in need for international loans. However, those are not going to be finalised before important reforms are put in place. These reforms will inevitably be painful and will affect public subsidies for staple goods that would affect any government at the ballot box.

Morsi was showing no sign of speeding up the process to acquire the loan. Conventional wisdom states he wanted to hold elections first. In this way, however, important injections into the ailing economy were delayed.

In all this, Morsi’s fault was not that he was acting in a theological straitjacket but that he was being too partisan, putting his party’s electoral interests before the nation’s well-being.

If the political instability in Egypt continues, its consequences may show up in Malta as further migrant arrivals

The newspaper reports since the crisis began suggest that many ordinary people saw through his strategies and resented them. It would explain why, when the massive protests began in June, the army sided with the protestors. It was siding with the likely majority.

It also explains why the general reaction to the massacres has been muted. It is not just the media, traditionally anti-Islamist, that has been uncritical of the army. Interviews with ordinary people indicate the many believe that the Brotherhood has been trying, since Morsi’s ouster, to render the country ungovernable. Perhaps even to steer it onto the road to civil war.

This kind of cynical analysis gives cause for concern, even if we assume it is right. It points to a population that is ready to extend fewer rights to its adversaries than it is willing to claim for itself. That is a recipe not for stability but for escalation.

In making assessments of the future I often find that it is useful to go back to history.

On the plus side, one can find that Egypt has had a vibrant multi-party past, which was disrupted by de facto military rule. Unlike in other Arab countries, there is a tradition to draw on.

People who believe that the Muslim Brotherhood may be destroyed by these events, however, had better think again. The Brotherhood has its own experience of flowering and suppression, only to flourish again.

This history will give its members the faith that they can and should resist.

At this stage, one must therefore assume that the generals will continue to effectively govern the country, despite the civilian coalition in place. The secular opposition to President Morsi was a mixed, divided group and that has not changed just because some of its representatives will now be in government. Meanwhile, plain clothes policemen are said to be out in force.

In making the case to our European partners to demonstrate more solidarity with the southern Mediterranean and Malta, we need to factor in both the current trends of migration and the realistic possibility that they may rise in the near future.

John Attard Montalto is a Labour member of the European Parliament.