Watch: Jon Mallia – ‘Independents And Third Parties Weren’t Strategic’
Third parties and independents weren’t strategic enough at the last MEP election and they should have rallied behind a single candidate, Jon Mallia has said.
Mallia has long called for the rise of a third political force to combat PL and PN. During a discussion on Andrew Azzopardi’s RTK103 show yesterday, he said that while there was a “cataclysmic paradigm shift” towards independents at the local council election, the same couldn’t be said about the MEP election.
He attributed this to the fact that voters had a wide range of third voters to choose from – such as Arnold Cassola, Conrad Borg Manché, James Ryder, and ADPD leader Sandra Gauci.
“Cassola got 13,000 first-count votes, whereas he got 20,000 back in 2004. However, in 2004, Cassola was competing against himself whereas this time around, he was competing against Sandra, Mina Tolu, Manché, Ryder, and they ended up cannibalising each other.”
“They should have sat down together before the election, realised that no more than one of them could pass through the door, and come up with a pact.”
However, Mallia confirmed that the pact should have excluded Norman Lowell’s Imperium Europa.
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