Malta: 20 Years in the EU

Twenty years after Malta joined the EU, some of the key players interviewed for a Times of Malta documentary tell Mark Laurence Zammit about the tension and excitement in the air as those historic events were unfolding. A sizeable movement of people within the Labour Party wanted Alfred Sant to turn in favour of Malta joining the EU after the 2003 referendum and just before the election that year, according to Joseph Muscat. “It was not just a few people, and they were arguing that the PL should acknowledge that the Maltese wanted to join the EU and that the party should change its policy ahead of the general election a few weeks later,” he recalled. “The opposing movement within the PL was arguing that would be too radical of a U-turn and would lose us all credibility. I was among those insisting we should recognise what the people wanted but at the same time acknowledged our credibility would have taken a hit with such an overnight change in policy.” Muscat, who then worked for the PL media arm and was part of the party’s administration, was speaking in an interview for a documentary on the 20th anniversary of Malta’s accession into the EU. In the 18-minute Times of Malta documentary, former prime ministers Alfred Sant, Lawrence Gonzi and Joseph Muscat, then journalist Miriam Dalli and then campaigner Simon Busuttil, and Times of Malta editor-in-chief Herman Grech recall the intense yet exciting historic referendum and election campaigns, while psychology professor Gordon Sammut and economist Marie Briguglio look back on how Malta has changed in its 20 years as an EU member state.