Neo-fascist newspeak: twisting the truth about what people ‘voted for’

Adrian Delia said this morning that “what the PN voted for is becoming reality” because Jean Pierre Debono is giving up his seat in parliament and so will the candidate who replaces him in the ensuing casual election.

This is a perversion of the truth. “The PN” – that is, party councillors and members – are empowered only to vote for the party leader and not for the Opposition leader. They did just that – they chose the party leader, and the fact that they chose one without a seat in parliament is their problem, not that of the wider electorate or those who voted for Nationalist Party candidates in the last general election when they did not even know of the existence of a fishy lawyer called Adrian Delia operating out of offices in Valletta.

People voted for Jean Pierre Debono to represent them in parliament, and they voted for the candidate who will replace him, too. I may be unable to stand Debono and his character type, but I can’t argue with the fact that people voted for him to represent them in parliament. That’s democracy.

So the removal of Debono from parliament is not, as Delia falsely claims, democracy or the people getting what they voted for, but the precise opposite.

The first thing the Nationalist Party has got to do is change its statute to remove this horrendous anomaly by which somebody without a seat in parliament can be a contender for the post of party leader. If they are going to persist with it, madly, then they have got to separate the two roles of party leader and Opposition leader. But to carry on with a situation in which somebody who is not a member of the House can be elected party leader is an insult to democracy. Because the only way that somebody without a seat in the House can get to become Opposition leader is by bullying, blackmailing or otherwise anti-democratically persuading an elected individual to thwart the wishes of his constituents.

Hadd mhu ikbar mill-partit: that neo-fascist nonsense has over the past few days been repeated ad nauseam on Facebook and elsewhere by people who haven’t a clue what they’re talking about. Perhaps if they knew it to be neo-fascist dogma they wouldn’t be so keen to parrot it.