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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
No other prime minister in the western world would have survived a fraction of the scandals Robert Abela is mired in. One of the selling points he keeps trumping is that he’s not as bad as Joseph Muscat. We don’t know quite how bad Joseph Muscat was which suggests we don’t quite know how bad [...]
Robert Abela "condemns favouritism". The Malta Independent reports he was "asked about a story regarding a Labourite who boasted on the social media of assisting 'Labourite brothers' to expedite their medical interventions. The Prime Minister said that the government provided equal service to everyone, including in the medical sector. 'If a situation occurred in which someone [...]
The games they play. First, they got Joe Debono Grech to glorify corruption, if it is Labour Party corruption because they can profit from Labour Party corruption but not from any other corruption. Having secured the sympathy and support of those for whom corruption is a job requirement for the politicians they choose to vote [...]
There were unsubtle differences yesterday in responses given by the prime minister and the finance minister to an identical question put to them by Newsbook. When Robert Abela was asked if he was considering revising growth projections after war broke out in Ukraine, he fell back on his stump speech on why Malta’s deficit has [...]
https://youtu.be/CZcbmH0Sj88
https://youtu.be/SgKF719Lly0
https://youtu.be/sKfq11ZY2vU
