Mintoff nephew running for MEP on Eurosceptic ticket

Ivan Grech Mintoff, nephew to the late prime minister Dom Mintoff, is running for MEP under the banner of Alleanza Bidla (Alliance for Change), a new Eurosceptic formation.

Grech Mintoff, a director at a software company, said the Alliance for Change is “neither left-wing nor right” and was founded on Eurosceptic principles.

“I’m confident that a substantial percentage of the Maltese electorate is fed up of this political class, and that they feel that their only way to voice their frustration is by abstaining from voting. Now we are offering them an alternative,” Grech Mintoff told MaltaToday.

He described his new party as an alliance “formed by several groups and individuals”, including Dom Mintoff’s anti-EU movement Front Maltin Inqumu. The alliance will be also fielding 57-year-old Anthony Calleja, and said that a third candidate could also be proposed.

Asked whether they would work towards an EU exit if they got elected, Mintoff’s nephew answered in the affirmative. “We will tear the Lisbon Treaty to pieces and negotiate a new pact. We would then turn back to our electorate for them to decide whether to remain in the EU with these new conditions… or opt for an EU exit. This is all democratic,” Grech Mintoff insisted.

He said the renegotiation of the treaty was possible since everything was pointing towards a substantial increase in Eurosceptic seats in the EP after next May.

Other proposals put forward by the Alliance in its ten-point manifesto includes a commitment to eliminate the competition between local workers and foreigners, and to allow irregular migrants travelling by sea to “continue on their way to other countries according to their wishes”.

Grech Mintoff said the alliance will pursue a policy to strengthen Malta’s neutrality and disarmament within the Mediterranean region.

He complained that Malta was no longer a sovereign nation under the EU, and that final decisions were being influence by larger member states. “Maltese politicians are deceiving the electorate. They are showing only the little good within the EU, and at the same time ignoring the huge disadvantages forced upon us.”

He mentioned the EU’s inability to control the economic recession, the lack of solidarity in migrant burden-sharing and the current monetary situation of the Euro as prime examples of the “EU’s mess.”

While Ivan Grech Mintoff describes himself as a socialist, the other candidate Anthony Calleja said he was a Nationalist activist in the 1970s who ended his relationship with the party for the way it dealt with former prime minister George Borg Olivier.