Opposition failed to understand people reject negativity - Muscat

The Opposition failed to realise that the people don’t want negativity, and persisted in carrying out a negative electoral campaign during the European elections, the Prime Minister said.

Joseph Muscat said that despite having suffered defeats in 2013 and 2017, the Opposition still didn’t change the way it operated.

The people, Muscat said as he addressed a political event in Zejtun on Tuesday evening, wanted to know where a party could take the country, and rejected negativty

“One would have expected that if the Opposition didn’t get the message in 2013, they would have done so in 2017. It seemed that they had realised in 2017 that they were too negative, and they went on to elect a leader who acknowledged the party had been too negative and that a new way was needed,” Muscat said.

“But, despite Adrian Delia being about to be subjected to his first electoral test, we have for the past month only had negativity coming from the Opposition.”

If the Opposition didn’t make the realisation that negativity wasn’t the way to go 2013, nor in 2017, voters have only one choice to make on Saturday, he said. “The choice is to go out and vote for all Labour Party candidates. And maybe this third time the Opposition will get the message.”

Muscat dedicated the bulk of his speech to describing how the government had managed to reduce Malta’s utility bills to the fourth-lowest in Europe. This was done without any help from the Opposition, which had only tried to create obstacles, he said.

“The Maltese are now paying the fourth cheapest bills in Europe,” Muscat highlighted, “Had it been for the Nationalists, we’d still be paying the most expensive rates in Europe, and I guarantee that they would increase every year, because they were using a failed system built on using polluting oil.”

He added that had the government not changed the system, the Maltese people “would now have been paying bills which would be even higher than those which [during the time of the last PN government] brought families to their knees.”