Parties in tit-for-tat over absent leaders and unfulfiled pledges

Here's how the PL and PN are spending the last hours of this campaign talking about 'issues'....

Muscat and Busuttil
Muscat and Busuttil

As the officialised boredom of Malta’s local elections enters its last hours, both Labour and the Nationalists have engaged in recriminations and tit-for-tats.

In a statment, Labour punned on the title of Italian lost persons’ television programme ‘Chi l’ha visto?’ (Who saw them last?) to mock Opposition leader Simon Busuttil’s apparent absence from touring localities and meeting the press in the final weeks of the campaign.

Labour says that the deliberate strategy was in response to the votes-for-works scam that the husband of former Gozo minister Giovanna Debono is alleged to have orchestrated before the last election.

In response, the Nationalists hit back, asking who has last seen Muscat’s LNG plant, promised by the Labour leader for completion by March 2015, but now postponed to March 2016.

Their statement was headlined in the Italian language: L’impianto elettrico di Muscat – chi l’ha visto? (Muscat’s power plant – who has seen)?

“All we have seen are photos of Muscat, Konrad Mizzi, Kurt Farrugia and Keith Schembri in Azerbaijan,” where Muscat met Ilham Aliyev without announcing it to the press. “All we have seen are high fuel prices, Muscat’s emails in the Cafe Premier scandal, and the baptism of Cyrus Engerer and Manuel Mallia as ‘soldiers of steel’.”