In a few days’ time, we will all be ringing out the Old Year and ringing in the New. This time, there will be less merriment and more self-restraint. We will be at yet another crossroads, and will have to decide whether to continue our voyage along familiar paths or take a decisive turning.
Deep down, the decision is political. Although there has been widespread rejection, active or passive, of many of our traditional processes of political participation, and a growing cynicism of its practitioners, nevertheless politics have taken the upper hand in national decision-making.
On reflection, this is not all that surprising. Political events have repeatedly brought Malta’s dilemma in sharp relief – her anguish as the opposing political forces pull her one way or the other, and the fear of its more sober citizens that politics is pulling her apart.
Politics are dominated by economics. There is never a moment when government politicians are not urging the nation to work harder, to be more efficient, to export more and to catch up with the European workforce.
The purpose of all this is for Malta to keep its place in the sun. But, all along, the workforce in Malta, and the rest of the population for that matter, has been reeling under the weight of rising taxation. Rising living costs eroded what was left of their spending power. And, at the end of it all, the government sank steadily in the mire of debt.
With the benefit of hindsight, public opinion can see how it has been hoodwinked.
The economy was fuelled (and inflated) by exorbitant public spending, creating for a time a feel-good atmosphere. Public spending was sustained largely by public borrowing, rising taxation and the proceeds from privatisation.
The end result did not, in the last resort, uplift either the workforce or the middle class, which aspired to a degree of upward mobility. Both were set back. Neither did it relieve the government of its debt burden – on the contrary, the national debt continues to soar.
Year’s end saw the government in distress. It made bold to impose new, savage burdens in the form of higher rates on water, electricity and gas consumption. Simultaneously, it anticipated, out of the blue, new prospective burdens in the form of national insurance contributions.
It begins to look that the government’s dilemma, which is of its own making, will inexorably precipitate a trial of strength this coming year.
Looking at the broad economic canvas, at this particular point in time, one would reasonably have expected the government to pitch for a resuscitation of the economy by pumping money into it – not by extracting more money out of it for its own purposes (e.g. the revamped Renzo Piano Valletta project). When the tax burden is such that all sectors of the economy are under strain, this was not the right time for the government to break with precedent and propose, out of the blue, a scheme to pay fat increases to all ministers and parliamentary secretaries. Whether out of arrogance or force majeure, the government has gone against the grain and antagonised a broad section of public opinion, the hard core being floating voters or Nationalist Party sympathisers.
It is this element that will decide which way Malta is to turn once we reach the crossroads.