Roberta Metsola Won’t Lead PN To Victory And Will Make Party More ‘Woke’, Former MP Edwin Vassallo Warns
Former PN MP Edwin Vassallo has come out strongly against a proposal to elect European Parliament President Roberta Metsola as leader of the Nationalist Party.
In an article on the blog of university academic Simon Mercieca, Vassallo referred to a recent MaltaToday article which quoted unnamed “senior PN MPs” as stating they want Metsola to become PN leader after the 2024 MEP elections, when her tenure as EP president would come to an end.
“If Metsola is elected as the PN’s new liberal leader, as Times of Malta and MaltaToday desire, the PN will keep on losing. Metsola is a friend of these newspapers but it is a friendship based on money.”
“If Metsola is elected leader, the PN will keep on losing. If the PN’s rebranding means it will become more liberal, then those who left the PL won’t join another party that has become a carbon copy of PL.”
Vassallo urged the PN to return to its conservative roots and offer policies “based on values that believe in people, life, families and freedom”, warning that a failure to do so could result in the rise of a new party.
PN leader Bernard Grech
“Woke journalists and editors are insisting that PN must continue down the liberal road it embarked on that led it to successive electoral defeats. I believe that this is the most natural thing the woke can offer the party.
It is essentially a polar opposite argument to the one posited by Home Affairs Minister Byron Camilleri, who warned yesterday that the PN is too moralist on issues like divorce and abortion and has repeatedly failed to understand and adapt to changes in society.
Vassallo claimed that the political disillusionment reflected in a recent MaltaToday survey, in which a quarter of respondents said they don’t intend to vote at all, stems from the lack of a true conservative party.
“If people wanted liberal politics, they would have stuck with the PL, which has made woke politics its political battlecry.”
“The PN didn’t lose trust because of who its leaders were; its leaders have all been honourable and indeed Bernard Grech mentioned them by name in his recent speech.”
“The PN is losing votes because people within its ranks believe it should be liberal, which is denaturing the party. They have long been trying to transform the PN into a liberal party that resembles PL, and over time the PN has become unrecognisable from PL and this is why the PN keeps losing.”
Cover photo: Left: European Parliament President Roberta Metsola, Right: Former PN MP Edwin Vassallo
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