Many flowers are wilting

This piece is being written before the long-awaited EU enlargement summit at Copenhagen concluded its deliberations yesterday.

The final outcome will, no doubt, be thoroughly examined in the chancellories of Europe and dissected by the media.

For Malta, the decisions reached will mark the beginning of a referendum campaign.

Peremptory and conflicting cries will now resound noisily, turning the campaign into a mêlée, riven by the clamour of partisanship.

Is Malta about to experience a new dawn or does the outcome of the Copenhagen summit represent the last rays of a setting sun?

The saga involving Malta's EU membership application goes back to July 1990. It is a story of certainties that became prospects, prospects that became possibilities and possibilities that became delusions - all leaving a trail of resentment smouldering across these islands.

At first, it was too easy to inhale, and to almost come to believe, all the euphoric anticipations voiced by PN politicians in parliament and, more so, at public meetings and in the media.

There were repeated assertions about millions of euros pouring into these islands. There were countless promises of support for Malta's membership bid by EU dignitaries.

These promises continued to be made after Malta was unceremoniously sidelined at the June 1994 enlargement, when Sweden and Finland, who had applied for EU membership after Malta, were admitted to the promised land.

All of this notwithstanding, the Fenech Adami administration soldiered on, while the prospects began to wane in the hard light of the facts.

When Malta submitted its original application for membership, the target was the European Single Market. In time, the original European Economic Community elevated itself to the status of a Union which proceeded to lay down conditions to be observed by candidate members before accession.

Things came to a point where applicant countries were told that, for the first years after accession, they would have to accept conditions inferior to those enjoyed by existing member states - in the sense that direct payments to farmers would be capped to a level of 40 per cent of those being paid to farmers in France, Spain, Italy and other EU member states of long standing.

While all this was going on, Malta, like other applicant countries, had to negotiate its own terms of entry and the going was hard.

The Maltese negotiating team kept the show not so much on the road as off the rocks, since most of its significant requests for derogations, in recognition of Malta's special circumstances, were resisted.

It managed to obtain a small number of brief transition concessions with minimal shelf-life and most of which involving loss of ground from the word 'go' - as in the case of Malta's exclusive coastal waters and hunting and bird-trapping regulations.

Ten years ago, the electorate was offered the prospect of a sumptuous fare. It is now left with unappetising leftovers.

What is worse, Malta has to pay for the leftovers. It has been classified as a net contributor to the EU!

Malta suffered the ultimate indignity when it was denied an additional seat in the European Parliament, while the EU was ready to concede additional representation to Hungary and the Czech Republic.

Times have changed and many flowers are wilting. Suddenly, the Fenech Adami administration is facing an electorate, a sizable part of which is unsmiling and in a questioning mood.

This administration requires a psychological readjustment. In the final analysis, it has to come to terms with the fact that, when it comes to dealing with the EU application bid, power resides in the electorate. They are the masters and this is democracy in action.

On its part, the electorate is as conscious as the politicians that nobody has a freehold in democratic politics.

The day of decision is now within sight and is looming larger and larger. In proportion as we approach it, many people acquire a sense of crossing a terrain less firm, of a desire to breathe an air more pure.

Interests will, no doubt impose their claims and rivalries will clash - but electors will become, every day, more human. Their survival instinct is their lifebuoy.

Nations live and die by the way they respond to the particular challenges they face. The nations that survive are those that rise to meet the moment, that have the wisdom to recognise the threat, and the will to turn it back and that, moreover, do so before it is too late.

For some time, Malta has been sinking under its economic and associated social afflictions. During recent years, the exponential curve of public debt has risen steeply, stimulated by government profligacy. Steep taxation has squeezeded vital energy out of the economy. Hunger has been prowling outside a number of factories.

While Brussels has been watching anxiously for signals about the extent of Malta's resolve, the government has meandered its way through a tortuous process of fudging and hedging and dodging.

The Fenech Adami administration has given the impression of a depressed and inflexible government with a leaden touch. Its leadership is pedestrian, arrested by a geriatric stalemate.

For all its public relations paraphernalia, its lucidity is muddled up and the muddle it finds itself in becomes clearer by the day.

While destiny is in the making and fate is about to be sealed, it will have a hard nut to crack, come the referendum, the more so when the promise of so many euro millions has been inverted and transformed into a burden Malta could hardly sustain in its present condition.

This unleashed a tidal wave of growing disenchantment. Can Canute stop the tide?