A visibly sleepless Prime Minister speaks to the Public Broadcaster at Egmont Palace

Yesterday, Prime Minister Robert Abela joined EU leaders at the informal defence meeting in Brussels. He avoided a doorstep interview by the press only to give an exclusive interview to the Public Broadcasting Services (PBS). The footage shot by PBS was also circulated to some pro-government newspapers like MaltaToday, but we didn’t receive a copy of it despite being the first to report on the event and the Prime Minister’s presence at the meeting.

You can freely watch the interview here, and you can also download the video because MaltaToday does not have the copyright for this and we are technically paying for it with public funds.

Prime Minister Abela gave a very brief statement to PBS saying that Malta’s neutrality should be discussed to clarify its limits , but this does not mean that he intends to allow Malta to constitutionally join any military alliances. The position of the Labour government will remain.

The Prime Minister was very ambiguous and unclear about his plans. Although we already know that he and his cabinet colleagues are in full agreement to augment the capabilities and arsenal of the Armed Forces of Malta, the government still does not want to participate in any defence initiative by the European Union.

The Labour government’s policy on defence is senseless and we actually don’t need to amend the constitution to clarify the limits – we would only need to do so if we would want to remove these limits and effectively have the constitutional right to join any military alliance at our discretion.

The Labour government’s policy on neutrality is senseless because we are already de-facto in a military alliance. We have informal defence agreements with Italy and France for intelligence and maritime security and France remains as our long-term backer in defense in case of crisis. Italy also made pledges to the Maltese government to intervene militarily in Malta at our request in case of a military attack.

We are basically part of NATO, having all the NATO privileges and absolutely no obligations to the military alliance. You can’t really complain with such a privileged status.

The Prime Minister looked visibly tired and sleepless as he gave the interview and we assume this is because he had a hard time last week justifying his actions to clamp down on Magisterial Inquiries.