The Malta Independent 23 July 2026, Thursday
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Malta's national interest would be to send Abela home

Noel Grima Sunday, 24 May 2026, 06:43 Last update: about 3 months ago

But it's not going to happen. Resign yourselves to seeing more of him, as the machine cashes in and takes its due.

If he sees what's coming Abela will wipe the smirk off his face. After all, he called the election early probably because if what's coming happened before the election, people would throw him out.

People have been persuaded that voting for Labour will guarantee the level of affluence they're enjoying. Nothing is furthest than this. The level of affluence is directly dependent on keeping and increasing the amount of Third Country Nationals flocking to Malta. 

Secondly this level of affluence is built on a huge debt mountain that must sooner or later be paid back, with interest payments surpassing what the country spends eg on education.

Thirdly, this level of affluence is dependent on keeping so many incompetent and corrupt hangers on with their grip on power.

Those who will have helped Abela in this heist will in time be held accountable by the entire people for all that's coming. They will have nowhere to go and hide. They have burned their boats. 

This goes for you pollsters who got huge government handouts. All those who had any small or big hand in the mammoth enterprise that covered Malta in billboards, television stations with advert breaks at huge expense.

If PN lose the election they have only themselves to blame. Robert Abela accumulated so many mistakes it should have been easy to overcome him. 

But PN were weak when they should have been strong, they didn't offer a fundamentally different alternative. Many times they were soft, many times they offered solutions that mirrored Labour's so people reasoned that keeping Labour was, all things considered, better.

Labour was ripe for the taking and PN missed their chance.

PN never even considered doing what Magyar in Hungary is doing right now - taking back from people what they should not been given, what they've stolen. 

Abela prefers a pyramid structure with everything coming from him. It should have been the easiest thing to undermine and topple him. But PN miffed it.

Still, many did stand up to be counted. Even those who could not stomach Alex Borg and/or Sarah Bajada,  those who did not succeed and could not make the party accept their criticism and do better.

The entire nation will soon realise it has put its trust in a man, in a party, that's as unstable as the buildings that have been crashing down.

I am writing this before most people have gone to vote but this is what's going to happen. The polls have been saying it for a long time and the polls are rarely wrong. 

People just shut down and refused to believe. The crowds following the Leader of the Opposition, their flags and their certainty they are about to win with hindsight will seem ghastly in their mistaken belief. 

Once again the Nationalist Party will have proved to be woefully inadequate to the task it faced. 

Its central core, from Leader to its media, is riddled with inefficiency and incompetence.

They will be beaten by the powers of incumbency, by a party in government which brazenly outspent it in everything,  from billboards to spots on the media including the social media.

The rules of a fair contest were broken in so many ways and there was not so much as a whimper coming from Brussels.

But what made the Nationalist Party weak was the Leader himself for all his activism. His inconsistencies were daily picked up by the government media but were not addressed. 

Like a parallel situation in the UK and its Labour government the party in Malta was rife with dark whispers about the Leader and his household.

In Britain too the mainstream media hid the full extent of the enormous crowd at the Reform protest on Saturday for a more patriotic government. Here in Malta the Nationalist Party is nationalist only in name.

It was shamed into silence by accusations of racism moved by the pro-Pal intelligentsia when the bedrock Maltese is anything but pro-Pal.

The party was wrong on the macro and wrong on the micro. It allowed the government to dilly-dally between Russia and the West, more in favour of the Islamic countries than perish the thought of Israel. Its support of the EU was lukewarm and interest-driven, so different from the full-blooded support you find in Ukraine and now in Hungary, and on the streets of Georgia.

The Leader also proved to be ineffective to rein in his main contender who threw his weight around most probably without informing his Leader about coming gigs.

Only a few candidates have managed to retrieve the bedrock nationalism of the party that harkens back to Nerik Mizzi, the party that is unashamed to proclaim itself Christian and European even before the EU was born. And that in Nerik Mizzi's days was definitely on the side of the workers, not on the side of the rich (that side was occupied by Strickland's supporters).

As a result we're condemned to remain in a country too small for the people inhabiting it, a dirty, noisy hell where you're forever in a traffic jam going nowhere, a country taken over by developers if not by people from outside Europe. 

As I'm saying today, had the electorate been any different, more mature, less focused on material gain, had the Opposition been better led, Abela should have long been sent home but most probably he won't.

What remains of the Nationalist Party must not succumb to despair. The coming months should see PN redefining its main features even as Robert Abela becomes more and more a slave of the developers.

Even at this late hour people must not give up. They must continually regroup and redefine their objectives. 

One of the immediate tasks facing PN is to commit to rethink Malta in Schengen as Ireland has done. Malta must regain control of its borders.

Malta must regain its pride as a sovereign nation with its own identity and language, its traditions and nature.

Over the past weeks I have argued strongly for the rebuilding of the Royal Opera House as  a symbol of our national identity. This commitment is not on any programme. It will only be when a party includes it as a commitment that we will know we are at last on the right track.

If Malta is to move ahead, Labour must lose. This is important for Labour itself, to find once again its real roots. To have a Socialist government which lies and says all cancer treatments are free, when they aren't, is the pits. The choice ahead is not so much putting PN in government but ridding the country of Abela's PL. The rest can wait. But if Abela is returned the onward progress of the country is blocked. 

This bad 13-year nightmare must be brought to an end.

 

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