Only recently, we celebrated the 40th anniversary of our country’s Freedom Day. Later on this year, we shall celebrate our 55th anniversary since acquiring Independence. 

The significance of acquiring Independence and subsequently being able to declare that Malta has made further steps ahead by becoming a Republic and by proclaiming freedom from depending on having foreign forces stationed in the country, even if that itself was done on the basis of a negotiated contract that the Labour government had reached with the government of the United Kingdom in the early seventies, can only be that the people enjoy sovereignty and freedom.

One report after another is indicting the present government for threatening our freedom, rule of law and our democracy. 

Spokespersons for the government try whenever possible to put the blame on Nationalist politicians for somehow conniving to ‘betray the country’ and fester such reports.

This kind of spin is itself an affront to democracy and to human rights, in particular to our freedom of expression, befitting more of a dictatorship than of a government that genuinely has our rights and the rule of law at heart. Still, even this spin can never explain how one institution after another is finding our government at fault.

Those institutions include Transparency International, the International Monetary Fund, the Venice Commission, the House of Commons in the UK, and the Committee of Experts on the Evaluation of Anti-Money Laundering Measures, which is known as Moneyval, a permanent monitoring body of the Council of Europe set up to monitor if the relevant legislation is being implemented effectively or not. 

And guess what? We are on notice for having failed the test – now risking being placed on a blacklist that could lead to serious repercussions on our economy.

If that were not enough and the above list is by no means exhaustive, Greco – the Group of States Against Corruption – has established that our criminal justice system is at risk of paralysis. Greco officials visiting Malta last October were “confronted with a culture of secrecy of many institutions, where reports, recommendations and conclusions are not published”.  

We deserve to be given back our freedom from rampant and blatant corruption, from money laundering, from fear and all forms of intimidation

Will the government have the courage to publish the Greco report?

In the meantime, in a resolution recently adopted in the European Parliament by no fewer than 398 votes for and only 75 against, reflecting very wide cross-party support, offers the government and our national Parliament a blueprint of what needs to be done to safeguard democracy, rule of law and fundamental rights. 

We do not shy away from asserting that belonging to the European Union must offer us and all member states the necessary safeguards in favour of the freedoms and values that are enshrined in the European Union treaties and which are also meant to be the pillars of what this union and our membership of it is all about.

The government feels it is ‘licensed’ to keep moving as it pleases on the basis of its victory at the last general election and on the basis that it keeps claiming that the national economy is at its best ever. 

That is, to put it mildly, in serious doubt after that the predicted and promised surplus has suddenly become a deficit. 

Moreover, pensioners and workers struggling to survive on the minimum wage while competing against thousands of imported workers brought in to work in slave-like conditions, have to make the choice between the blatant and chauvinistic propaganda that keeps being blurted out and their inability to buy or rent homes for their families. 

Except for those who cherish propaganda as a means to confirm their bias and enjoy some form of contentment, the choice can only be in favour of the stark truth.

Speaking at our Nationalist Party club in Kalkara on Freedom Day, I made some reflections on the significance of Freedom Day for 2019. I called upon the government to give us back our freedom, and in that process give us back our country.

We deserve to be proud as a Maltese and European people. 

We deserve to be given back our freedom from rampant and blatant corruption, from money laundering, from fear and all forms of intimidation, from the take-over of all the institutions that are meant to protect the people rather than to serve as smokescreens for the high and mighty, and above all from the sheer greed that characterises the government’s innermost clique and which the Prime Minister keeps protecting over and above  the national interest rather than placing Malta first and foremost.

That is why we owe it to ourselves and to our country to actively participate in the forthcoming European Parliament and local council elections. 

Francis Zammit Dimech is an MEP (EPP Group) and a Nationalist Party candidate for the forthcoming European Parliament elections.

This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece