Delia’s road to MP open as all 7th district PN MPs pledge to give up their casual election seat
PN leader Adrian Delia is practically guaranteed to obtain a parliamentary seat and become Opposition Leader after Jean Pierre Debono decided to resign his 7th district seat and all nationalist candidates eligible for the upcoming casual election declaring that they would trade places with their leader.
The Malta Independent on Sunday exclusively revealed that outgoing Assistant Secretary General Jean Pierre Debono will cede his 7th districts seat to Delia.
This will trigger a casual election process, with the aim of finding a replacement. All PN, PL and PD candidates who took part in the general election on the 7th district will be eligible to contest.
However, it is highly unlikely, if not impossible, for a labour candidate to be elected, while it is also very difficult for Partit Demokratiku candidates, who ran on the PN ticket, to garner enough votes to make it.
Apart from Debono, another nine PN candidates ran on the district. Beppe Fenech Adami was elected (along with Jean Pierre Debono), while Edwin Vassallo was elected on another district. PD candidate Godfrey Farrugia was also elected.
This leaves seven PN candidates and two from the PD in the running. But all seven PN candidates – Sam Abela, Antoine Borg, Paul Mazzola, Peter Micallef, David Vassallo and Ian Vassallo – have declared that, should they be elected, they will give their seat to Adrian Delia.
Adrian Delia is therefore expected to become Opposition Leader in the coming weeks, though not in time for the budget.
Speaking on Radio 101 yesterday, Delia heaped praise on Jean Pierre Debono and other who, like him, had shown “great loyalty” to the party. “I have always had the greatest respect for Jean Pierre Debono, and now I have more. What the tesserati voted for will become reality thanks to people like Jean Pierre and others who have understood that the seat is not their own, but belongs to the electorate.”
Delia insisted that Debono had not come to him to negotiate or ask for anything in return. “He came to me, said he understood the importance of the situation and wanted to help the party move forward.” Debono later joined the programme and insisted that this was the most difficult decision of his life.
“I must admit that this was not easy. I did not sleep last night and I had difficulty explaining my decision to some of my relatives.”
Thanking his wife Kristy (also an MP) for her support and understanding, Debono said he will be resigning his seat tomorrow so that the process for Delia to become Opposition Leader can start forthwith.
“I followed the electoral process from the start. Delia won the biggest support in both phases of the election. He was chosen in a democratic process so every one of us, even if some of us did not support Delia during the campaign, should not unite behind our new leader.”
Debono said the party now needed closure so that it could move on and offer an alternative to the labour party.
During the interview, Delia spoke about poverty and said the PN would pressure the government to make this one of its priorities. He insisted that he did not want to alarm people but recent statistics showed that poverty had risen again. “We are not speaking about people who cannot afford to buy a third car but about people who do not even earn 60% of what is considered the required minimum. This means that people do not have access to the most basic things needed. Almost 100,000 people in poverty or at risk of poverty. We should make this one of the most important things in governance in this country. We are not saying that PN can make poverty vanish but we will push for this to become a priority.”
He again asked what the surplus was and where the money was going. “If we have a surplus then poverty should be decreasing, not increasing. What happened to the hundreds of millions of euros that were made from the passport scheme? Are any new schools being built? The money is not being used on roads and the new hospital is not being paid for by the government.”
Both the government and the Labour Party reacted to Delia’s claims on poverty. The PL said Delia should check his facts, pointing out that local and European statistics had confirmed that Malta registered a surplus.
The government said that, as a fact poverty had decreased, and Delia was purposely misquoting statistics. It said that those who were at risk of poverty or social exclusion had decreased by 9,000. At the same time the average gross income of families had increased to €26,247 in 2016.
PD candidates to contest casual election
In the meantime PD yesterday said its candidates would contest the casual election, despite it knowing that it cannot succeed in blocking the newly elected PN leader from entering Parliament or win another seat.
It said it does not believe that Delia has the the necessary qualities. “In PD’s opinion, the credentials of the PN leader will not go far in giving credibility to the Opposition or the potential alternative government it aims to portray. Therefore, the executive of PD has unanimously decided that our candidates will contest the by elections.”
PD said it was elected as a watchdog as part of Forza Nazzjonali and therefore feels morally obliged to intervene.