Environment Minister Mario de Marco has called for urgent and effective action to stop the “bleeding” within the Nationalist Party.
I find it inopportune that my father’s memory was brought into the fray. The last thing he would have ever wanted to see is a divided party or his name being used in a divisive, opportunistic motion
“Our party currently appears to be bleeding and needs to urgently heal itself from these wounds quickly and effectively if we want to approach the next election as a united front with a fighting chance of winning,” he told The Sunday Times, when contacted.
Nationalist MEP Simon Busuttil wrote in his column in The Times last Wednesday that the party must come clean on the fact that it is “divided”.
Dr Busuttil and Dr de Marco are highly influential members of the Nationalist Party and both are seen as potential leadership candidates.
Within less than a month, the government has lost two crucial votes, with three Nationalist MPs voting out of line with the party resulting in the resignations of former home affairs minister Carm Mifsud Bonnici and outgoing EU ambassador Richard Cachia Caruana.
Dr de Marco said the current state of affairs was of “grave concern” to him and the Maltese public.
While the government was performing well against the odds and had a responsibility to continue fulfilling the mandate given to it by the people, the PN had to deal with its issues, he said.
The conflict within the party was now starting to have an impact on the government, he said, as evidenced by the two “casualties” in Dr Mifsud Bonnici and Mr Cachia Caruana. Certain people in the party had to move away from “the politics of me” to “the politics of us” but there were also other wounds that had to be healed, he added.
Asked how this could be done, Dr de Marco said there were options, but the party must first come to grips with the problems “from an immediate and long-term point of view”.
“The party has to be firm. But we have to move forward and put this bickering behind us,” he said, without elaborating how.
“When you realise what is happening around Europe, you realise how capricious we are to be wasting time debating these senseless internal issues when there are many more issues of substance we should be talking about.”
Asked about Nationalist MP Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando’s recent allegations that Mr Cachia Caruana colluded with Labour in 1996, Dr de Marco said: “All I can say is that I have always known Mr Cachia Caruana to be a person who gave his life towards the service of the country.”
He said it was Dr Pullicino Orlando’s prerogative to substantiate the allegations, but he always considered Mr Cachia Caruana to be a person with only one aim: “to be of service to his country”.
“And he has done that infallibly,” Dr de Marco said.
On a poignant note, he also criticised Dr Pullicino Orlando for using the name of the late Emeritus President Guido de Marco to substantiate an argument that PN and government officials “cavort” with a blogger who derides Nationalist icons:
“I find it inopportune that my father’s memory was brought into the fray on more than one occasion during and after the Richard Cachia Caruana motion debacle.
“My father’s memory thankfully does not need defending. It stands on its own merits. The last thing my father would have ever wanted to see is a divided party or his name being used in a divisive and opportunistic motion.
“He suffered too much to see the PN in government to ever tolerate this. Moreover, I know that despite occasional differences of opinion or style, he held Richard Cachia Caruana in the highest regard and that the respect was mutual and longstanding.”