Over the years people have called you all the nasty names they could think of, the worst I believe is when you were accused of having made a pact with the devil in order to get elected in 1996.
My admiration for you never wavered, though of course many a fervent Christian insinuated that I was your greatest fan and madly in love with the colossus of the Labour Party.
Still I go through life with a famous phrase I repeat to myself over and over again: “Sticks and stones may hurt my bones but words can never hurt me.”
Nobody realised, or maybe they did not want to, that I was none of those things. What I actually did admire about you was your assertiveness, your integrity, your courage in calling a spade a spade and to hell with the repercussions as long as you believed in yourself.
But of course dirty minds get dirty ideas. You get this kind of people everywhere.
Do you remember how indignant people were when, just before the election of 2003, you read out a list of all the factories and establishments that were going to go bankrupt once Malta was a member of the European Union? How they jeered at you, how they insulted you by saying that all your speeches about what was to come was a figment of your foolish imagination. I wonder who’s having the last laugh now, the Nationalist Party itself, the people who voted for them or the unemployed whose fate you warned them about?
Many an ardent Nationalist is proposing a Labour victory at the next polls not because of your good self and the way you are delivering your “messages” across to the people, but because between the Nationalist Party and the Labour Party, the latter seems to be the lesser of two evils.
Not so Dr Sant, not so. You are going to govern because you do not trample over the Maltese the way the Nationalists have done.
You are not a liar who hides one thing in the depths of your heart and speaks forth another. You did not present a budget akin that can be compared to the atomic bomb that was dropped upon the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945.
You are a leader with a sense of love and charity, two emotions that the Nationalist Party lacks. Their leader could change every year but inside they would still be the same. They are all downers who promised that Malta would have a new spring and it would metamorphosise into a garden (Malta isn’t green).
How quickly they forget what they promised even though our brain can record 800 memories per second for 75 years without getting tired.
Our country needs you Dr Sant. You are the antidote needed to cure our country. Bear the “bombing attacks” from the other side because no one can make you feel inferior except yourself. You will be the next Prime Minister who will pull us through the nightmare we have lived for years.
Valerie Borg
VALLETTA