We are the workers’ party - Alliance for Change

Euro-sceptic party Alliance for Change, which will be contesting the upcoming MEP elections, has called on those persons who had planned to abstain from voting at the elections to place their faith in the Alliance instead.

The party’s chief spokesperson Ivan Grech Mintoff, who is also the late Dom Mintoff’s nephew, said that in the 10 years since Malta’s accession to the EU, the Union had lost its strength and had become one where a federal form of government was in place.

“When Malta chose to become a member, Europe was strong,” he said. “Now it is a system which resembles federalism.”

“It orders its member states what to do and does not allow for those countries to contest any of its decisions,” he said, adding that if people had to refrain from voting, things will remain exactly as they were.

Grech Mintoff said that this election will prove to be a different one than the two previous MEP elections (in 2004 and 2009). “This election will be based on facts and not promises,” he said. “Voters need to make their own rational decisions as to whether Malta is better off being part of the EU, or not.”

Grech Mintoff also took the two major parties to task for supporting Martin Schulz and Jean-Claude Juncker to become President of the European Parliament, placing the blame of Malta’s “precarious position” on the two.

“These are the people who have put us in this precarious position,” he said. “It is certainly not helping that the two big political parties in Malta are supporting candidates like Schulz and Juncker... we don’t believe that our future should be in their hands.”

He said that it was contradictory for the local political parties to inaugurate monuments of great statesmen who worked tirelessly for the working class, but to then act in the exact opposite way. “We praise these people as national heroes, as we should, but then we place our faith in foreigners.”

“The path of federalism is a failing one,” he said. “We are on the wrong path and we need to act quickly.”

Grech Mintoff was speaking at a press conference at the foot of Msida’s ‘Worker’s Day’ monument in honour of the feast, which is celebrated today. Rather appropriately, he referred to the Alliance as the “party of the worker”.

“We need to get rid of all this austerity and start basing our policies back on the worker,” he said.

Meanwhile, fellow party representative Anthony Calleja said that the Alliance for Change was the only party left “seeing eye-to-eye” with the Maltese workers. “We are the only ones offering a shred of light in a situation covered in darkness.”

“All we do, we do in the name of the workers,” he added.