Seventeen Nationalist MPs want Adrian Delia to leave the Nationalist Party leadership, a statement issued today said.
The statement was posted online by MP Claudette Buttigieg, and has since been endorsed by others, but it is unclear who the signatories are.
The statement says that 25 of the 30 MPs were present for the parliamentary group meeting which was held on Wednesday. The other five were excused.
The discussion during the meeting centred around the political situation in the country, including the recent surveys that were published showing a decline for the PN. Twenty-one of the 25 MPs took part in the discussion.
Seventeen of these suggested that in view of what is happening, Delia should consider his position. Only four members said he should stay.
The PN leader told the meeting that he had taken note of what was said and will consider the situation before making a decision.
It is therefore not correct that the PN leader goes to the media after the meeting to tell them that he will stay on. The agreement was clear that before making such statements he would inform the parliamentary group of the decision, Buttigieg (above) said.
The statement is similar to the position taken by another PN MP, Jason Azzopardi, this morning.
Earlier, another MP, Therese Comodini Cachia, also vented her anger at her leader in a letter she sent him, which was copied to the parliamentary group.
She accused Delia of taking them all for a ride. “How can you take yourself and all of us for a ride, but above all how dare you fail to understand that you cannot fulfil your role as leader of the Opposition and leader of this party anymore?”, she wrote.
The MP said Delia had failed to realise that the advice given to him by the parliamentary group was backed by a “real and factual failure, that is the failure in garnering credibility, leadership and respect.”
She said MPs had agreed that something was wrong with the leadership and there was a need to plan an exit for Delia.
"None of us says this with a smile on our face, we make this call out of a need to restore our party and the country’s democracy," she said.
Comodini Cachia (above) said she was not calling for an abdication by the party leadership, but rather a structured process.
“Your departure, and by ‘your’ I mean the ‘leadership’, cannot be an abdication. It must mean a beginning of a chapter and consequently a plan agreed by all needs to be shaped and implemented.”
“I am willing, actually I believe all of us are willing, to do sacrifices even on our political careers. You need to make one final decision as leader: decide your own path of how to move out of your role as leader but let it be a path in which you do not destroy the party and the country’s interests.”
“Despite the paranoia of division or maybe the thinking of ‘divide and conquer’, the parliamentary group has showed you for a number of months that it can unite behind a cause.
"Yesterday, I understood our message to be that since we have now united after a cause we want a ‘tmexxija’ [leadership] that can lead us to execute our work with credibility and respect."
“This tmexxija (leadership) unfortunately is not capable of doing that, even if each one of you is very capable of doing other things and of taking on other roles. I ask you therefore to reconsider the hastened decision you informed the media of yesterday.”