EVERY six months, one of the European Union’s member countries gets to take its turn as president of its council of ministers, chairing meetings in Brussels, negotiating with the European Parliament and so on. For the union’s smaller members, this is both an honour and an onerous obligation, requiring the government’s full attention. So it is surprising to find the EU’s tiniest state, Malta, which is in the middle of its stint as president, plunged into an early election campaign. “Suddenly, it’s panic stations and they seem to have completely forgotten the European presidency,” says Daphne Caruana Galizia, an anti-government blogger.

Malta’s prime minister, Joseph Muscat, has given his island steady economic growth (5% last year), record-low unemployment and its first budget surplus in 35 years. Small wonder that his Labour Party is favoured to win. However, Mr Muscat called the vote, scheduled for June 3rd, after a stream of corruption allegations stemming from the release last year of the so-called Panama Papers: more than 11m files belonging to one of the world’s biggest offshore law firms, Mossack Fonseca.

None of the claims—many of them made by Ms Caruana Galizia—directly involves Mr Muscat. But the most recent concerns his wife, Michelle Muscat, allegedly the beneficial owner of a company which was paid more than $1m by a firm belonging to Leyla Aliyeva, the daughter of the president of Azerbaijan. Mr Muscat’s spokesman calls this “an outright lie”. Azerbaijan has important links to Malta, including a long-term agreement to supply gas, and the Aliyev family is said to have used Malta for financial transactions. Azerbaijan’s links to European institutions are already under scrutiny in Milan, where a prosecutor is investigating allegations that it paid a €2m ($2.2m) bribe to an Italian member of the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, which is a separate body from the EU.

Mr Muscat has asked the courts to appoint a magistrate to investigate the accusation against his wife. “My duty, however, is not just to protect myself but also to safeguard my country,” he said while announcing the election, “and I will not tolerate a situation where jobs are lost because of uncertainty.” He also vowed to sue Ms Caruana Galizia, who says she has already received more than 20 writs issued by various members of the government or people close to it.

The government’s reaction has arguably been every bit as worrying as the claims made against it. In February, a minister secured a warrant to freeze Ms Caruana Galizia’s bank account after she claimed that he had been seen in a German brothel. He denies it. Days later, the government tabled a bill to force Maltese news websites like Ms Caruana Galizia’s to register with the authorities; after protests, that provision was withdrawn.

Ken Mifsud Bonnici, a legal adviser to the European Commission, wrote that Malta was facing a “veritable collapse of the rule of law”. At the root of the problem, he argued, was a constitution (bequeathed by Britain, Malta’s former colonial ruler) that hands vast powers to the executive, without the checks normal in a democracy. For example, only the police, who answer to political authorities, have the power to initiate investigations, “so police investigations against the government or without its consent are impossible”. On May 7th, the Sunday Times of Malta reported that the island’s financial watchdog had told the police it had a “reasonable suspicion” that the prime minister’s right-hand man, Keith Schembri, had been involved in money-laundering. Yet the claim, which Mr Schembri denies, was not investigated, the paper said.

Does any of this matter beyond little Malta? If Mr Mifsud Bonnici is right, it does: whichever party is in office, the island could be used by dubious interests as a private back door into the EU.