Tajani spokesman urges Sant to contest EP election

PN MEP election candidate Peter Agius, who is the spokesperson for European Parliament President Antonio Tajani, has urged Alfred Sant to contest the 2019 EP election a day after the former PM hinted that he could run again.

“Without getting into his decision, I can only say that I wish that I could have an adversary with ideas of his caliber,” Agius told The Malta Independent yesterday. Alfred Sant, who was the most successful candidate in the 2014 EP election with 48,739 votes to his name, recently said that he had not yet decided whether to contest the upcoming election, due to be held in May of next year.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat urged his predecessor to consider contesting the election one more time. Speaking from Brussels, where he was attending an EU Summit on Brexit, Muscat said Sant is second to none in the way he analyses situations, encouraging him not to leave it to the last moment to make up his mind.

In his first reaction, Sant indicated that he might contest. In a Facebook post quoting Muscat’s comments from that morning, the former PM, 70, wrote: “In the circumstances it will be difficult to ignore (Muscat’s) words.”

The Labour Party has so far announced a list of 10 candidates who will be representing it in May, but so far Sant is not officially one of them. That might change after the PM’s clear call on Sunday morning.

Speaking to this newsroom yesterday, PN candidate Peter Agius admitted that since Sant was “the protagonist against joining” the European Union (EU), it left many pro-Europe individuals with mixed feelings.

Although, he went on to say that after seeing him working in the European Parliament and in Malta as an MEP, he admired the extraordinary energy he had in communicating the real Europe to the citizens.

Agius, who addressed the PN’s General Council on Sunday morning, said: “In a lot of his positions one can still feel the little skepticism for the European project as a whole. However, I think he’s done a lot of good because he put emphasis on measures of interest to Malta and also changed certain decisions to be better adaptable to us.”

On the other hand, Agius did raise the issue that he wished Sant had taken a clearer position on certain “mistakes” made by the Labour Government that he himself must not have been comfortable with.

Alfred Sant led the Labour Party from 1992 to 2008 and served as Prime Minister of Malta between 1996 and 1998 and as Leader of the Opposition from 1992 to 1996 and from 1998 to 2008. While his decision to contest the EP election in 2014 was met with surprise by many, mainly because of his euro-scepticism, this did not hold him from emerging as the most successful candidate in that election.

Questions sent to Alfred Sant’s office yesterday morning remained unanswered by the time of going to print.