Labour’s Serb candidate ‘attacking Malta’, says MEP candidate Dione Borg in Facebook rant

There has been backlash from one of the PN’s MEP candidates over comments by a Labour councillor who accused the Nationalists of ‘stoking the fire of hatred’. 

PN candidate and journalist Dione Borg took umbrage at a report on Serbian-Maltese local council candidate Alexander Pevac who told the PL general conference that he felt “hurt and betrayed” by the Nationalist Party’s anti-foreigner rhetoric. 

“Why are some people making me feel different? Why are some political parties think we are two classes of people?” Pevac, a teacher who is running for the St Paul’s Bay council election, said. “Do they think that they’re pure and we’re not? I feel hurt and betrayed when I hear the PN stoke the fire of hatred with words of what he calls foreigners. How do I explain those words to my daughter? Do I have to apologise to her that her surname is weird or that her name is strange? I want my daughters to feel safe her like everybody else.” 

But Borg hit back on Facebook “condemning” what he insisted were unfounded allegations from Pevac. “It is a barefaced lie that the PN is spreading hate,” Borg said.

Borg has already been called out for his own views on non-Maltese residents in Hamrun, after posting a reporter-style video on Facebook in which he painted a negative picture of migrant workers and businesses in the locality.

“All Pevac needs to do is look around inside Labour to see who wanted a pushback [of migrants] and see who led a campaign against foreigners before 2013,” Borg said referring to the botched pushback attempted by Joseph Muscat after he became PM in 2013. 

“The PN does not want an economy based on quantity but on quality of work. We believe in the strengthening of Maltese communities with our values and principles. Pevac’s declarations bring about a negative feeing in society and it is an attack not just on the PN but on Maltese people. It is unjust to attack our country with such lies.” 

In his speech Pevac praised Labour for making Malta more open to foreigners. “Sometimes I get the feeling that foreigners don’t really feel that Malta is their home,” he said. “I want them to feel included, to feel what the genuine Maltese are like. I want them to contribute more to our social life in keeping our country safe and clean and great.”

Last week the Nationalist Party’s deputy leader Robert Arrigo denied pandering to xenophobia, after he and party officials shared mocked-up photos of Labour billboards stating: ‘We made an error: we stuffed Malta with foreigners’. The photo-shopped billboard featured along others mocking labour’s “mistakes” in various fields, and took social media by storm in what was seen as an attempt to deflect attention from the PR blunder which saw the PN putting up a billboard with a spelling mistake on the first day of the electoral campaign. 

But Arrigo, a hotelier and himself an employer of foreign labourers, insisted that the PN had nothing against foreign workers and that the message was not xenophobic although aimed at the influx of low-paid foreigners.