“In a democracy, the people end up with the government and leaders they deserve." - Joseph De Maistre As predicted, Labour is again in power with a bigger majority. In spite of all the scandals and sleaze, the majority of the Maltese voted for continuity of corruption, of shady deals with known criminals and for [...]
From my article in The Sunday Times today: "While the PL finds ways of surviving its coming internal turmoil, understandably confident given that they survived the crises of end-2019 and emerged stronger from an ordeal, which should have rightly devastated their political chances, and while the PN’s church walls rattle and threaten to undermine the fresh [...]
Unless proven otherwise, I'm going to continue to work on the assumption that Labour have won today's election. And I'm also going to work on the assumption that Labour have also been working on the assumption that they have won today's election. All the polling pointed to that result so no other assumption is more [...]
When the polling stations closed on 3 June 2017, Daphne Caruana Galizia published this guest post I had written for her blog. I link it here not to show off my gift of foresight. It remains largely relevant today just because it is quite shocking how in spite of all the things that happened since [...]
Read prior episodes of this series by my wife, Clemence, who is on the Polish border with Ukraine here, here, and here. Very early this morning, Marcin and Wojciech came back from Lviv. They returned from a mission delivering essentials including urgently needed supplies for emergency surgeries. They describe the situation in Lviv right now [...]
https://youtu.be/E1jVXQV_ZUo
Yesterday, I posted here an image of promotional material for a Labour Party candidate that had attached to it a voucher to get free fuel from a petrol station. Newsbook chased the candidate, one Edward Cassar Delia (no relation), who said he didn’t do it. Someone else must have stapled the voucher to the advert. [...]
On her third day on the Polish border with Ukraine, working as a volunteer, Clemence sent in this thought. Body bags. Unloading body bags from a van to stock for yet another trip inside war-torn Ukraine. Perhaps to my surprise I find myself developing what feel like coping mechanisms even for this situation. As we [...]
Polls at the end of the campaign by and large yield the same figures of polls before the campaign started. The consistent results in surveys conducted by different analysts reinforce each other and the confidence that they are correct. Whether Robert Abela manages to increase the record gap over the PN that Joseph Muscat secured [...]
This website is informed that General Workers’ Union officials contacted this morning dozens of Gozitan voters ostensibly to give them a “job interview”. Within minutes of these fake interviewers, these voters were offered a full-time permanent employment contract under the community work scheme run by the union. Dozens of contracts were signed on the spot [...]
You look at the picture above, the brazen normality with which this thing is received, and you realise just how far our so-called democracy has eroded. A candidate sends his potential voters money in the form of a petrol voucher to encourage them to vote for him. This is not just pathetic. It's not just [...]
Entry requirements to join the University’s Junior College have been eased to allow students to join the high school considered as the pathway to university education without a certificate in English or mathematics. The old requirement of a pass in Maltese or one of three sciences (physics, chemistry, or biology) has also been scrapped. Requirements [...]
I’ve had to update the post I published yesterday surveying matters in which our electoral process falls short of international standards because a new shortfall I was never aware of emerged over the day. The court yesterday rejected a plea from the Nationalist Party that wanted the early vote conducted inside the prisons cancelled and [...]
My wife, Clemence, continues her diary of her trip to the Polish border with Ukraine. Her first entry is linked here. You only need a few hours driving from place to place here to realise just how real is real. Nothing one sees on TV or reads online can give the true feeling of what [...]
The only possible interpretation of this Facebook post is that Ms Magro got a free TV from government Minister Michael Farrugia and she's expressing public gratitude for the gift. It is not an enormous leap of faith to think that now Josephine Magro will vote for Michael Farrugia at Saturday's ballot. If that's her house, [...]
Malta’s electoral process falls short of international democratic standards. This article surveys some of those shortfalls on the eve of the 2022 general election. Freedom of expression A 3-judge inquiry found the Maltese government responsible for the environment of impunity that allowed a journalist to be killed in 2017. The inquiry’s recommendations have not been [...]
When war broke out in Ukraine, I knew I could not just sit watching it on TV, soothing my conscience with a donation, feeling I had done my part. Watching millions of people trying to escape their country and crossing the border into Poland, I recalled the many stories I had heard at long family [...]
There’s a headline from Bernard Grech’s interview with Times of Malta which quotes the Opposition Leader say “Daphne will have died in vain if PL win with larger majority.” I think I know what Bernard Grech meant to say and none of it is bad, but that specific quote is not how I would have [...]
I wrote this morning about Robert Abela collaborating in the lie of his invisible Russian tenants that claimed they lived in her Żejtun property to acquire an EU passport. Lying about where one lives is a bit of a cottage industry in Malta. Consider how many people lie about where they live in order to [...]
