Party machine faves and contractor’s partner inside Labour MEP line-up

Editorial note On Saturday, 13 January, Marie-Elise Agius communicated with this journalist to inform him that she is no longer an MEP candidate for Labour. Dr Agius claims she withdrew her candidature in September, during which she was given time for a reconsideration. MaltaToday found no official announcement on this decision, and prior to publication, Matthew Vella contacted Labour Party spokesperson Ronald Vassallo on 2 January for a confirmation as to whether Agius was still a candidate for the Labour Party. No answer was forthcoming. Since this information was correct at the time of publication, no changes are made to the article, except for a reference indicating the witdhrawal of Mary-Elise Agius.

Malta’s prospective line-up for the European elections will welcome a new crop of candidates in 2024 that as usual delivers some outliers to this kind of election.

With incumbents Alex Agius Saliba and Josianne Cutajar (Labour) and Roberta Metsola and David Casa (Nationalist Party) seeking to increase vote counts and retain their MEP seats, a big deal of votes from the 2019 election are up for grabs with some MEPs calling it a day and other former MEPs having resigned their seat.

For example, Miriam Dalli – elected in 2019 with over 63,000 first-count votes – is today government minister. Former Labour prime minister Alfred Sant, who had over 26,000 first-count votes, will not be contesting the 2024 elections, and Labour MEP Cyrus Engerer (over 5,300 votes) is yet to officially confirm his intention.

So, Labour will be opening up its European ranks for quite some renewal, but its line-up includes candidates already part and parcel of the party machine and its government establishment: these include former Mtarfa mayor Daniel Attard and Gudja mayor Marija Sarah Vella Gafà.

A well-known addition is the economist Clint Azzopardi Flores, currently a Bank of Valletta employee who in the past served as Malta’s political and security committee ambassador to the EU, and president of the budget committee at the European Council during Malta’s presidency.

Flores is the husband of former ambassador to Brussels Ray Azzopardi, himself a former mainstay inside Labour’s media organisation One. With his personal livestreams on Facebook, Flores has built himself a reputation for geopolitical and EU analysis, imparting explainers on political developments in Brussels which have been positively received by his social media followers.

Daniel Attard, 31, was a former mayor of Mtarfa and served as deputy high commissioner to the UK under former minister Manuel Mallia in his London posting. A law graduate, he was also a former communications coordinator for former minister Evarist Bartolo. Attard has also served as a technical attaché to the International Labour Organisation in Geneva, and then as a legal attaché in Brussels, after a public call.

Marija Sarah Vella Gafà, 28, is the current mayor of Gudja and serves as a policy consultant in the energy and environment ministry of Miriam Dalli. Her father Paul Vella serves as policy consultant at the strategy unit of Stefan Zrinzo Azzopardi’s ministry for public works and planning.

A surprise addition is Jesmond Bonello, a former president of the Union Ħaddiema Magħqudin, certainly a union that is not Labour-affiliated. Today he is a director of regulatory compliance at the Foundation for Social Welfare Services. His 20-year background in trade unionism also saw him serve as a board director for the Occupational Health and Safety Authority, as well as the NSO’s Retail Price Index board and the Employment Relations Board. He also represented UĦM inside the Malta Council for Economic and Social Development, as well as other EU fora.

An ‘outlier’ to this line-up might be Marie-Elise Agius, born 1987, a lawyer by practice who also owns a café. In 2013, she had been appointed to the board of directors of the Employment and Training Corporation (now Jobsplus).

Her personal Facebook profile shows photos taken during the Christmas holidays showing that she is in a personal relationship with construction developer Michael Bugeja. Indeed, she represented Bugeja’s company Bilom Construction Limited in an industrial tribunal case concerning an unfair dismissal back in June 2021.

With Labour’s One News having also quoted Agius in soundbites propping up the administration’s contractor licensing rules, this candidate might face questions over Labour’s carefree association with the construction industry. Since publication on 12 January, Dr Agius has got in touch with MaltaToday announcing she had withdrawn her candidature (see editorial note above).

Nationalist newcomers

The Nationalist Party will see its strong incumbents Roberta Metsola, who is president of the European Parliament, and David Casa, eager to retain their strong showing.

For Metsola, often touted as a potential leader-in-waiting, her re-election is a foregone conclusion, which means many of the PN’s candidates are hoping to be touched by the grace of her second-preference votes or eat away at Casa’s constituency of voters.

These include returning candidate Peter Agius, a former director of the European Parliament office in Malta, and today a civil servant at the European Council in Brussels. A lawyer by profession, his European expertise has allowed him to remain active on many domestic issues he has lobbied on with the European Commission by way of representations that brought to the fore Maltese experiences or complaints. He is increasingly associated with the Maltese agricultural community, whose problems and challenges he often highlights, and this will be his second political outing in the European elections. In 2019 he obtained over 10,400 votes, the fourth-highest number for the PN.

He might yet be pipped by the sheer force of the donkey-vote by David Agius, the Nationalist MP and former deputy party leader, who is now top of the PN ballot sheet by virtue of his initials. But Agius has considerable political experience, a long history within the party as a former Net TV news anchor, and will be expected to employ a forceful campaign strategy to either eat away at Casa’s vote count or clinch the third seat the PN is aiming for in 2024.

The younger newcomers to the PN’s European line-up will include Miriana Calleja Testaferrata de Noto, who resigned as president of the PN’s youth wing MŻPN. Testaferrata is also a lawyer, who has been active in student politics with the European Studies Organizations ESO.

Two interesting additions to the PN’s line-up are speech-language pathologist Norma Camilleri, who serves as CEO of the Malta Federation of Professional Associations. She is active within her sector and represents both the European Speech and Language Therapy Association and local Association of Speech-Language Pathologists as president. Camilleri also works with social partners within the MCESD, as a civil society representative within the health, ageing and pensioners’ sector. She is a musician by training.

Another lawyer, LouiseAnne Pulis, completes the PN’s line-up. Graduated with a Masters in Human Rights with a specialisation in democratic systems and demography, she has focused her practice on justice for vulnerable members of society, as a member of her family lives with autism.

Third party fight

Returning to contest the European elections – his fifth such outing – will be independent candidate Arnold Cassola. A former founder and chairperson of the Maltese green party, he split from Alternattiva Demokratika in 2019 in protest at fellow candidate Mina Tolu’s call for a debate on abortion. Since then, Cassola has been active as a self-styled citizens’ watchdog: in 2004, as AD candidate riding high on the wave of EU accession support, he garnered over 23,000 votes; in 2019, he got 2,127 first-count votes.

ADPD this time around will see party leader Sandra Gauci, deputy chair Mina Tolu, and longtime secretary-general Ralph Cassar contesting. The party in 2019 got just 1,867 first-count votes, spurned in part by Cassola’s hasty departure. ADPD were also pipped to the ‘third party’ place by the surprise success of Partit Demokratiku candidate Cami Appelgren, whose over 3,000 first-count votes embarrassed then PD leader (and former Labour minister) Godfrey Farrugia, who garnered only 1,660 votes. Now that ADPD have merged, the Green Party will hope it can recapture some of those lost votes.

But they will have to contend with the reality of far-right firebrand Norman Lowell, a Holocaust denier who in 2019 got over 8,330 first-count votes. Lowell has secured himself a role as a convenient, anti-immigrant baiter who collects protest votes with his calling card of hate: with no government at stake during the European elections, Labour and Nationalist voters who feel alienated in this mid-term election park their votes with the far-right as a way of ‘punishing’ hubristic party behaviours.

It is yet to be seen whether mainstream party talk on foreign workers in Malta, and allegations of “infrastructural pressures” brought by the recruitment of non-EU nationals, often serving in lowly or minimum wage jobs, will send more votes to the far-right. For Bernard Grech’s PN, the strategy might be fraught with risk.