Watch: Start Small – Sandra Gauci Urges Third Parties To Focus On Local Councils
ADPD leader Sandra Gauci urged small and emerging parties to focus on making an impact in local councils before taking the next step towards larger elections.
“I think these parties are rushing too much, when you need to take things step by step,” Gauci, who was elected to the St Paul’s Bay council last year, said in an interim with Lovin Malta’s Tim Diacono.
In a mea culpa moment, Gauci admitted she might have been guilty of that fault when she contested the European Parliament elections last year but said she felt back then it was her duty as ADPD leader to do so.
“I feel that the way forward is to start humbly from the bottom and rise to the top,” she said as she urged small parties to follow in the footsteps of Ħaż-Żebbuġ’s independent mayor Steve Zammit Lupi.
“Steve Zammit Lupi is a story of success. He started as a councillor, then eventually got elected as mayor. He wasn’t in a rush and that is the way we must operate. The mistake small parties, starting with us, have made is that we haven’t formed a solid base in local councils before taking the next step towards general elections.”
“Our resources are what they are, and we don’t always have to thing big.”
Gauci said that local councils are the perfect opportunity for third party politicians to show their voters what they’re made of.
“Councillors work very closely with people. To a certain extent, people don’t care about corruption. They care if there’s a hole in their street or rubbish in front of their door that they want you to sort out. If you aren’t even capable of fixing a hole in the street, how can you fix the bigger picture?”
“However, if you prove your worth with the smaller things, people will start trusting you. They might trust you to fix a hole today but tomorrow they might trust you with a ministry.”
Do you agree with Sandra Gauci’s argument?