Power Without Accountability: Malta's Mirror in Europe's Ugliest Week
In Somalia, a twenty-seven-year-old woman was sentenced to three years in prison for criticising her government online.
There is a moment in every political scandal when the people responsible stop explaining themselves and start explaining why you shouldn't be bothered. Watch for it. It arrives quietly, dressed as competence.
This week, Europe handed Malta's political class a gift they didn't deserve: a continent-wide demonstration of what happens when those in power treat accountability as optional. In Argentina, Manuel Adorni — architect of Javier Milei's public messaging, the face of libertarian austerity rebranded as moral clarity — resigned under the weight of a corruption scandal while his boss insisted on his innocence with the confidence of a man who has never once had to prove anything. In Wales, Reform UK members caused walkouts and tears in the Senedd, then voted against their own party's positions, apparently uncertain what they stood for beyond the noise of arrival. In Somalia, a twenty-seven-year-old woman was sentenced to three years in prison for criticising her government online.
Three different countries. One consistent logic: the people with power deciding, without consultation, what the people without power are permitted to say, do, or demand in return.
Malta should be watching. Not because we are Somalia — we are not, and the comparison would be insulting to Sadia Moalim Ali, who deserves more than to become a metaphor in someone else's op-ed. But because the architecture of unaccountability is not built in a day, and it is never built obviously. It is built in the gaps: in the planning applications nobody publishes properly, in the public consultations held at inconvenient times, in the governance reviews that recommend and are subsequently forgotten.
The EU's suggestion this week that military-age Ukrainian men could lose protection status — a position Kyiv itself has endorsed — is a reminder that even the institutions we hold up as bulwarks against the worst impulses of nation-states are capable of calculus that sounds reasonable until you ask who bears the cost. It is never the people in the room making the decision. It is always someone else, somewhere less comfortable, with fewer options and no press officer.
Maltese workers navigating a cost of living that climbs while wages do not — the nurse driving forty minutes to a shift, the renter watching another landlord double the price — they understand this arithmetic intuitively. They live inside it.
The small detail that stays with me from this week's European political theatre: Paul Hogan, eighty-six years old, calling Pauline Hanson a pelican. Not because it matters. Because sometimes the most honest response to someone weaponising your identity is to refuse to treat them as serious.
Malta's opposition could learn something from that instinct. Not the insult — the refusal to be flattered into complicity.
The house doesn't burn down at once. It starts in the walls.
