Gzira mayor Conrad Borg Manche said that it is highly likely that he will contest the next local council elections as an independent candidate, but understands that the way the current electoral system works it is probable that, if elected, he will not retain the post of mayor. 

This is because the person who is elected mayor is the candidate of the party that wins the most votes, and Borg Manche would therefore need to obtain, by himself, more votes that all other candidates of the best party put together.

In an interview with The Malta Independent on Sunday, Borg Manche said that the way the system works in general, it is very hard for a third party or independent individual to infiltrate the political system.

“It all boils down to what the people want; I know that there are many who want me,” he said, adding that Malta is the only country in the whole of Europe which has only two parties represented in Parliament, a situation that has been ongoing almost all through the last 60 years since Independence.

“The system is worked by the two parties, for the two parties,” he said.

Borg Manche is making these considerations as he mulls his political future following his recent resignation from the Labour Party, which he represented at local council level for the past nine years, always as mayor. It will be a different experience, for him, to serve as a councillor after holding the top post in the locality for nearly a decade and this is one of the issues that he is pondering upon before making up his mind.

Borg Manche left the Labour Party two weeks ago and, in a strongly-worded letter, said he had no other option but to resign. It was the toughest decision of his life, he said at the time, but everyone has his limits, listing a string of events that pushed him to quit “so that everyone knows the reasons and no one speculates or invents”.

The Labour Party’s reply to his five-page letter was two short sentences, in which it thanked him for his services and that the door of the party remains open.

Asked whether he would be willing to return to the PL, Borg Manche said that “it depends on what you are going to find inside”, adding that he is “not interested” to go back with the state of affairs being what they are today.

“It was a very big decision for me to resign… things don’t change overnight.”

He said that after his resignation there were delegates and other party members who spoke in his favour with top PL officials, and there were Members of Parliament and “a particular minister”, who showed their support privately, “but the rest nothing”.

On the same day Borg Manche resigned, which was the day when the PL was holding its general conference, Prime Minister Robert Abela spoke about the PL’s socialist roots, a clear reference to Borg Manche’s letter in which he said that the PL was no longer a socialist party which focussed on the lower classes and workers.

Asked about this, Borg Manche said that decisions taken, where he was involved with the government, speak differently to what Abela said.

He listed some of the issues he had included in the original letter of resignation, such as the proposal for a garden in Gzira to be converted into a petrol station. “It is the opposite of socialism,” he said, given that the Lands Authority wanted to take back part of the public garden in Gzira that had earlier been handed over to the local council.

Last April, the Gzira local council had won a court battle to protect the garden. “I had been promising that garden since 2015,” said the mayor, adding that “I would not have managed to sleep had I known that there was going to be a fuel station next to swings where children play, with my blessings”.

“We are already suffocating in this country,” he said.

What “broke the camel’s back”, as he wrote in his resignation letter, was the delay in the issuing of warrants to lawyers. Borg Manche was one of more than 100 who were waiting for it for several months.

Ironically enough, days after Borg Manche published his letter of resignation, lawyers were called in to be given the warrant.

Asked whether he felt responsible for the pushing of the ceremony to happen, he said that “even though it can be seen like that, I am not sure”.

Despite this, Borg Manche said that after the ceremony there were many colleagues who approached him and thanked him for speaking in their favour in his letter of resignation.

Another issue which Borg Manche also spoke about, which was also tackled in his letter, was the Jean Paul Sofia public inquiry.

Borg Manche said he was upset when the Labour Party MPs voted against a motion to have a public inquiry appointed to look into the case of the youngster who had died when a building under construction in Kordin had collapsed last December. “I felt like crying when I saw those scenes in Parliament,” he said, referring to how Sofia’s family reacted when the Labour MPs voted against the inquiry.

“I told Robert (Abela), in his face that had I been a Member of Parliament with him, I would have voted against him, whatever the consequences.” Borg Manche questioned the position taken by the party given that “someone died because of negligence, where a building fell on him”, describing it as “crazy when you represent the party of the workers”.

Incidentally, four days after the vote, PM Abela made what has been labelled as a colossal U-turn by calling a public inquiry, hours before a protest was to be staged outside his offices in Valletta.

Commenting on the original Labour Party’s refusal to commit to a public inquiry, with reference to the PM he said that “I think he did not want that the shortcomings that exist are exposed”.

Remaining on the topic of construction, the mayor said that some people working in the construction industry do not do their job properly.

On a particular occasion, the mayor witnessed a particular contractor who was allowing development to take place in a dangerous manner, with chunks of stone falling from the façade. When approached, the developer insisted on calling their “ministers”, however Manche called the same ministers and asked them to commit in writing that they were going to take full responsibility if someone was to get hurt.

“I was with the Labour Party because my principles are socialist,” he said. But nowadays the party’s approach “is only pro-business”.

He said that the country should help businesses economically “but not at the detriment of the people, where they end up suffering the consequences of exaggerated development”.
Going back to his problems with the PL, Borg Manche said that he always spoke his mind. “I’m not controllable, what is wrong I say that it is wrong. I don’t care.”

Borg Manche had even participated in the Xebbajtuna protest against excessive construction in May this year. The mayor had also addressed the gathering.

He said that "if you have a clean conscience you enjoy doing the things you do”.