In my view, the worst thing that has happened to the Nationalist Party in these elections is not the fact that it has suffered another massive and humiliating defeat at the hands of Joseph Muscat and his Labour movement. It is the fact that PN voters have again elected David Casa and Roberta Metsola, both of whom left no stone unturned to undermine Malta’s reputation abroad, particularly in EU institutions.

Both of them have already committed themselves to PN voters to continue doing what they have been doing in the European Parliament and other EU institutions. Hence, we will again be watching them urge their MEP colleagues to attack our country as a “Mafia state”, a country where the rule of law has collapsed, where institutions “have been hijacked by the government” and where ‘money laundering’ was the order of the day and the police looked the other way instead of taking action.

Adrian Delia, like Simon Busuttil before him, has not yet realised that the vast majority of the Maltese people abhor this kind of political rhetoric where, instead of proposing solutions to our country’s problems, the PN tries to create grave problems to Malta’s economy, hoping to slow down, if not halt, the outstanding economic progress Malta is achieving under Muscat’s stewardship.

The very first thing Delia must do, if he truly wants to learn the lesson given to him last Saturday, is to rein in Metsola and Casa. Instead, he congratulated them on their election and urged them to continue what they had been doing so far. He evidently wants an even bigger defeat in 2022, if he is still at the helm of the PN by then, since both of them played an important part in Labour’s massive victory.