All this fuss about how many women made it to the EP. Nobody’s mentioned the pensioner factor.
There’s been a lot of fuss in the newspapers about the fact that of Malta’s six MEPs, four are women.
Yes, and two are pensioners. Why has that not been remarked upon? Two-thirds of Labour MEPs (Alfred Sant and Marlene Mizzi) are pensioners.
And please don’t anybody write in to fidget with the technicalities and claim that Mrs Mizzi is not a pensioner yet. She collects her Kartanzjan next year.
So to round things up: the Labour Party has got itself a couple of pensioners and a television showgirl (that’s how she sold herself to the electorate).
The Nationalist Party has, to use the defining terminology preferred by Labour, two youngish women and a gay man. And the youngish women did not market themselves as show-girls or pose for ‘saxy’ campaign pictures. They are a human rights lawyer and a dynamic political campaigner.
Nor did the gay man sell himself as a gay man, use himself as a tool or ghettoize himself as ‘tal-gejs’ as happens with any gay man unfortunate enough to nail his (rainbow) colours to Muscat’s mast.
I think the MEP results have really shown which party – or rather, which part of the electorate – is truly progressive and liberal. So much for Labour’s propaganda to the contrary.
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On this note, one result that did surprise me was Helga Ellul’s lacklustre performance. I would have thought she would do better, maybe even get a sniff at being elected.
Do you think her performance is because she is a pensioner or because she is a foreigner? Or, more worryingly, because she is a successful business woman so people perceive her as out of touch?
I have known Helga Ellul since she first came to Malta in the early seventies when Playmobil was set up, when at the time I was sssistant secretary and later secretary of the Metal Section of the General Workers Union.
Mrs Ellul was instrumental in setting up the factory, and ended up as managing director of a labour force of 1000+. She has held high positions in the Federation of Industry, the Chamber of Commerce, and served also as chairperson of MCAST.
It is my view that she did not obtain the votes she deserved not because she is a foreigner – after all, she is a Maltese citizen and has been for some years – but because she does not speak Maltese even though she understands it.
Mrs Ellul deserved to be elected.
It is sad that Helga Ellul’s potential and professional performance was not recognised by a larger majority.
If votes had an economic weighting in terms of tax contributions paid by entrepreneurs, perhaps the votes she received would be telling a different story.
Modern Malta, it seems, still needs to be hand held through the motions that lead to success, needs to be thanked and feel appreciated in every day motions of life. Ego-stroking, thankfully, is not Helga Ellul’s area of expertise.
Who is Ellul to the man in the street? Contexts in Malta are not only confined but restricting. Communication should concentrate on a breakdown of the message not on pictures of the lifestyle of that person.
The general public needs to find the dots joined for sound conclusions to be arrived at.
The Labour side know that this is where their forte lies: Where the dots are joined by misrepresentation, their majority is there to lap it up without further analysis.
The Nationalist Party needs to improve on the manner the dots and their links are communicated.
Also, Helga Ellulcan afford to speak from a broad angle because experience does that to successful people, but this can be double-dutch to the man in the street who has no clue what the broad terms apply to in everyday broad-to-narrow focus precision and application. The message needs to be simplified, with example and literal. Either that or pictorial.
Her vision is foreign policy that they’ve never encountered.
I hope that she stays with the NP and delivers that vision internally.
It would be a huge waste to lose her.
Can you imagine if Cyrus Engerer had been elected as an MEP, the ‘taghna ilkoll gay brigade’ would have made a song and dance for all to see.
How is the opposite message going through?
Appeal to the Maltese press corps: please ask Alfred Sant to categorically state which political group he will be sitting with in the EP. Will it be with the most federalist group in the EP, namely the Social Democrats or his ideological brethren on the euro-sceptic right?
How happy I am that once again I used my brain cells and voted for the PN candidates!! The results show one thing: the MLP voters voted for MLP, whilst the PN voters voted for MEP candidates.
A human rights lawyer with a foreign husband at that.
Within the Maltese mindset, even that would add to being liberal.
I’m very pleased for Therese Comodini Cachia and the Nationalist MEPs.
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I am equally pleased to report a serious loss of “briju” for Joseph Muscat from certain Labour supporters.
Even for them, his style of politics is not clean. They see right through the marketing and it is not “gelling.”
What is wrong with being a pensioner. I imagine Juncker, Barroso and Juncker would also be pensioners then.
[Daphne – Nothing’s wrong with pensioners. But when two of your MEPs are pensioners and the other sold herself as a dolly-bird, and none of them are gay, after you have spent the last five years telling people that yours is the party of the young, liberal, gay and progressive, something is clearly wrong because your electorate’s choices haven’t fit with your message.]
Exactly as per rowdmepp. In 4 years the movement should consist of around 80% of under 50s.
A sharp brain is not fussy of the type of body or sexual orientation of the person it’s wired onto.
I have also always found positive discrimination to be demeaning and working against the woman.
That’s exactly what I thought. Looking at the candidate line-up of the two parties, I could not feel more proud that I am part of the electorate who chose the 3 fit for the job.
“Two-thirds of Labour MEPs (Alfred Sant and Marlene Mizzi) are pensioners.”
Labour people live in the past.
Pensioners, women – there are endless possibilities.
83.3% of the MEPs have 100% of their own hair.
83.3% have written 0 novels.
16.5567% were fired after just 36.5567% of their term of office.
Baxxter, I can’t believe I have found an error in one of your posts.
66.6667% of the MEPs have 100% of their own hair.
[Daphne – Having observed the situation at close quarters, I believe you’re wrong there.]
We have two highly qualified women who hardly wear any make-up, a “sexy” show girl wearing stilettos and lots of make-up, and an asexual strange pensioner who is academically bright but lives in a world of his own, accompanied by a self-made, hard-working man who is never lost for words or good arguments.
I pity Marlene Mizzi – she has found herself in a very odd situation.
One can see cooperation between the PN MEPs, but I can’t imagine the three PL MEPs working together.
Vera, għax Marlene Mizzi is on a level of her own.
But seriously now. I pity Sant, mostly. He’s going to find out what a P&D straight jacket feels like. And if he decides to go rapporteur, he’ll discover that his true function is to collate a multitude of amendments through tedious committee sittings for legislation scripted by unknown technocrats working in the Commission. Ah…, and he’ll finally read the final report live in plenary before the votes are cast (on the frivilous amendments and the report itself).
He can claim to be a “euro-realist” and beleive in “the concept of a Europe of nations” but he’s not going to do any of that politics. Not while his socialist comrade-overlords are holding his leash. A mild ‘euro-realist’ speech every now and then is all he’s going to manage. We had that with Scicluna, but it did not matter when he came to play rapporteur.
One wonders on how much she spends on botox, fillers and so on.
[Daphne – Nothing, I would say. She looks every bit her age in real life. You’re too accustomed to viewing her via photoshopped images. But that’s irrelevant, anyway. Nobody assesses 60-year-old that way.]
Nobody’s mentioned the donkey vote either. If Therese’s surname wasn’t Comodini she wouldn’t have inherited Casa’s votes. And if Clint was not Camilleri he would have inherited more from Cuschieri’s votes.
And yet, Joe Fenech, Joseph Muscat has referred as the “dynamic team”. He’s living in cuckoo land perhaps.
We feel confident and rightly so that the Nationalists MEPs will do their job in Brussels. But we have doubts about the Labour MEPs. We always had double standards. One is for the Nationalists and another for Labour.
Please don’t think that I have some weird obsession with wigs but another statistic is that of the six MEPs, both our male reps are wig-wearing.
[Daphne – I don’t think so, actually.]
I dare say the PN will always suffer in these elections. Hunters and the EU don’t go well together.
They come in thousands and taking their families into the equation you will get the PN off balance forever.
Nationalist hunters may opt to abstain but the Labour supporters who hunt outnumber the Nationalists by far.
None of the Nationalist MEPs had their picture photoshopped to make themselves took 30 years younger than they do in real life either, and that is not because they’d look like junior school children if they had done so.