Watch: Cyrus Engerer Becomes First-Ever PL Politician To Attend A Repubblika Event
Cyrus Engerer has broken ranks with the Labour Party by attending and addressing a meeting organised by Repubblika, a NGO that the PL has repeatedly denounced as being part of the opposition.
By accepting their invitation to address its discussion on clean politics, Engerer became the first ever PL politician to attend a Repubblika event in the NGO’s four-year existence.
“I try to attend all events I’m invited to by NGOs and other organisations, especially those that relate directly to my work in the European Parliament committees I’m a member of,” Engerer told Lovin Malta.
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“This was the first invitation I got from Repubblika to attend an event they were organising. Since I was going to be in Malta and the subject discussed is of interest to me and is also directly linked to my work, I felt it was important for me to attend the round table discussion.”
“Should they have invited me to other similar events in the past I would have also attended. In fact, when last year they sent a document with their proposals on how to improve the functioning of our democracy to all Maltese MEPs, I had also replied with my thoughts on their proposals and further suggestion from my end.”
He said he was surprised when he was told during the meeting that he was the first ever elected PL official to attend a Repubblika event.
“It’s a pity that the tribal bi-partisan political landscape we have leads to the absence of dialogue. I do things differently. Maybe that’s why, six years ago Randolph and my self were the only two PL officials to be present at the vigil on the day Daphne Caruana Galizia was assassinated.”
In his intervention, Engerer endorsed all of Repubblika’s 20 proposals for a ‘cleaner republic’ and urged them to go stronger on a proposal that political parties should be majority state-funded.
Political parties, Engerer argued, should be completely state-funded, and the same rule should apply to political candidates.
Engerer also issued the following five proposals:
1. Elected officials should publish all their meetings with lobbyists, organisations and businesses. The PL had actually proposed this in its 2017 manifesto, with Engerer stating that he had pushed his party to include it, but it was never implemented and was left out of its 2022 manifesto.
2. Malta’s electoral law should be updated to facilitate the election of third parties and independent candidates to Parliament. The current system, Engerer noted, essentially obliges parties to acquire some 17% of the vote in a single district to elect a candidate to Parliament, which is a huge obstacle for a third force.
3. Citizens should be allowed to propose their own laws to Parliament through a regulated system.
4. Similar to the lobbyist proposal, politicians and candidates should publish all their meetings with foreign politicians for the sake of transparency.
5. The Maltese authorities should work more closely with the newly-formed European Public Prosecutor’s Office
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