After years of excusing the inexcusable and protecting Joseph Muscat to this day, Labour Party leadership candidates Chris Fearne and Robert Abela are now falling over themselves to explain how disgraced former minister Konrad Mizzi (who was finally dragged out of his Ministry years after he should have been) will never serve in their cabinets. At the same time, Robert Abela tried to appeal to the extremists in his Party by coming out to say that the only scope for the national protests calling for justice is “to provoke”. He has some nerve.

Allow me to spell it out for him. Provocation is assassinating your critics and allowing an atmosphere in which journalists can be killed with impunity. It is allowing the mafia to take over our proud nation and allowing them to install criminals at the highest levels of Government.

It is protecting those criminals for years, allowing them to loot our nation at the expense of the poor and the sick. Provocation is sending in the army for a dozen activists, barricading public spaces and conducting vile disinformation campaigns.

Provocation is appearing on national television to claim that you are unhappier than an assassinated journalist’s family at her killing. It is spending our hard-earned money to fund criminal propaganda. It is allowing Ministers to cavort in brothels and empty taxpayer-funded mini-bars while on Ministerial duty.

Provocation is selling off our hospitals and healthcare to speculators who are only looking to make a quick buck on the backs of Malta’s patients. It is pouring laundered concrete onto our trees and killing our natural urban environment. It is allowing the pollution of the air our children have to breathe and causing respiratory diseases to soar.

Provocation is when you destroy the lives of honest, hard-working citizens whose only fault was to play by the rules, while those in power stole, lied and cheated. It is flying friends in on private jets to do your bidding and ensuring your permits reach foregone conclusions.

Provocation is defending the indefensible for a handful of votes and a few pieces of silver; it is allowing rampant corruption at every level of society and – worse – excusing it when it is exposed.

It is promulgating the politics of hate and division to serve the interests of the mafia and the criminal networks you allowed to seize power. It is the constant barrage of lies, half-truths and stonewalling designed to pull the wool over the eyes of an entire population.

Provocation is the constant mocking of a murder victim’s parents, husband, children and sisters by taking smiling selfies as they are outside in the cold asking for justice. Provocation is destroying a memorial every day for two years because the mafia’s conscience cannot be cleared.

Chris Fearne and Robert Abela should be apologising to the nation that their Party has betrayed. They should be grovelling for forgiveness and coming up with plans to fix our broken system to ensure this never happens again. They should be demanding that Muscat goes now so our nation can start to move forward. Instead, they have the nerve to talk of provocation. Disgraceful.

Muscat and the criminal network that has seized control of our country think they can take all of Malta for fools up to the bitter end. Muscat clings on – protecting those who think they can get away with murder and trying to drag the country down with him.

But they underestimate our revulsion, our fury and our determination. We will not allow anyone to cover this up. We will see justice done.

Malta is witnessing the most shameful, shocking, dark episode in its modern history. It is clear that the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia is linked to an Office of a Prime Minister seeped in corruption, omertà and criminality. Of course Muscat must leave now, and his Party must start to demand it, but it cannot end there.

We need proper accountability, serious prosecutions, the whole truth to emerge and massive reforms in order to fix our broken system and free our seized institutions.

Justice must be done and, after Muscat, nothing can ever be the same again.

 

Roberta Metsola is a Member of the European Parliament and Head of Delegation for the PN