Rights, roots and routes

The archipelago state of Malta (316 km² with a population of 402,000) is the European Union’s smallest member state. Since its independence from Britain in 1964, the Maltese polity has been characterized by a bi-partisan see-saw formulation that leaves little space for smaller political groupings. The two main parties are the centre-left Partit Laburista (PL, Labour Party, currently in opposition with 33 parliamentary seats) and the Christian-Democrat Nationalist Party (PN, currently in government with 34 seats); the Greens, locally incarnated as Alternattiva Demokratika (AD, Democratic Alternative, no seats), have been actively involved in national politics, with scant electoral success, since 1989. Arguably the three major political processes of these last two decades have been the accession to the EU in 2004, the liberalization of the economy post 1987, and the pluralization and subsequent proliferation of the media in the 1990s. The last, coupled with the burgeoning of new technologies of communication, has made it increasingly possible for emergent movements to engage with the public sphere.