Malta [European Journal of Political Research 54]

Abstract

Politically, Malta crossed a watershed in 2013. Elections held on 8 March delivered to the Labour Party (LP) a landslide victory, concluding an extremely long wait in opposition that had seen it twice reform itself from the solid socialist personality it had the last time it was an effective party of government. If the 1970s and much of the 1980s were in Malta the years of Labour (mostly dominated by the figure of Dom Mintoff), the years since the change of government in 1987 have been the post-socialist era of the right-of-centre Nationalist Party (PN).There has been one short-lived Labour government in 1996–1998, which was brought to grief by Mintoff opposing the less-than-socialist policies of his successor. Otherwise, it has been a long Nationalist government that saw Malta through a transition from a socialist to a market economy, from a political economy of consolidated growth under tight fiscal discipline to one of expansive growth powered by deficit budgeting and borrowing, from a nation pursuing a Mediterranean mission to a member of the European Union and the eurozone.