Politics was always a part of Mario de Marco's life.
Some could say he had little choice in the matter: as the son of one of the giants of Malta's post-independence politics, Mario de Marco was brought up in the political scene, and went on to serve in it for 23 years.
Sitting down with The Malta Independent on Sunday for a wide-ranging interview which reflected upon a life in politics after stepping out of Parliament, de Marco explained his upbringing, how he ventured into politics, his views on the last two decades in Parliament and in the Nationalist Party, and what's next for him.
Mario de Marco's political beginnings
"For a long time, my mother was more of an influence to me than my father. She totally hated politics, and wanted to ensure that none of her children follow my father's path. 'One madman in the family is enough,' she always used to tell us," De Marco said with a chuckle, when asked where it all started from.
But politics in the 1970s and 1980s was a difficult thing to escape from when your father was a high-up within the Nationalist Party.
Guide de Marco was Secretary General of the PN in the 1970s, and Mario de Marco recalled how one of his enduring memories is when, as a 9-year-old in 1975, he witnessed his father coming back home from an Independence Day rally drenched in blood as he had been beaten in the head by a police officer.
He recalled his father spending every Saturday after the 1981 election at the President's Palace in San Anton for talks on how to change Malta's constitution, and the tensions that followed later culminating in the infamous Tal-Barrani meeting and the assassination of Raymond Caruana.
"The irony is that at the same time, my father was always a very positive character," Mario De Marco said. "He engaged into what he was doing with great determination and perseverance, but at the same time he did it with great respect towards the other side."
"That led us not to hate politics, but to ultimately see that politics was something that allowed one to bring change. It was an instrument of change and an instrument of bettering your country. He always firmly believed that a political party was never an end itself, but a means to an end, with that end being doing what is good for your country," he said.
Mario de Marco's own active involvement in politics started after his father underperformed in the 1992 general election. That prompted him and his siblings to get more actively involved in the run-up to the next election in 1996.
That soon turned into de Marco become more active within the PN's structures: he became the president of the party's Hamrun sectional committee and then the representative for the first electoral district in the party's executive.
By the time the 2003 general election came along, Guido de Marco was President of Malta, and Mario de Marco was approached to contest the election as a candidate.
It was an election which was intrinsically linked with the referendum for Malta to join the European Union a month prior - a process that Guido de Marco himself had started as Foreign Affairs Minister in 1990.
"Seeing that the election was so intrinsically linked to EU membership, which was such a big aspiration for people in my generation, I thought that I would do my bit - and surprisingly, in a very short campaign, I got elected," he said.
The rest of the interview about the various stages of Mario de Marco's career can be found in links below
Mario de Marco (2) 2003 to 2013: A decade in government and a PM hard done by history
Mario de Marco (3) 2013: A big defeat, a run for party leadership, and no regrets
2014 (4): Mario de Marco’s ‘biggest disappointment’ in politics
2015 (5): Mario de Marco’s health challenges
Mario de Marco 2017 to 2022 (6): ‘Nobody was a hero back then’
2026 (7) Mario de Marco on how he had to be hard on himself and what's next