Jean-Pierre Farrugia speaks: 'The PN is no longer the party I once knew'

He recently broke ranks by renouncing an annual €7,000 salary increase in his MP’s honorarium, after the government found itself in a maelstrom of accusations of secretly increasing Cabinet ministers’ salaries by €26,000.

Now, in an interview with MaltaToday, Farrugia says he no longer recognises the party and that the PN is no longer what it was in the past.

He also  identifies with what the former president of the PN’s administrative council Carmel Cacopardo declared in his resignation letter, that he “did not recognise the party anymore”. But the MP, a popular GP in the first electoral district, says he still hopes the PN “recovers its identity”.

Farrugia said the increase in honoraria for MPs, to be effected with two years’ of arrears after ministers were awarded a higher parliamentary honorarium in 2008, had shocked people from all society’s strata.

“I am stopped by people in the street who are stupefied by the way the government is cut off from their realities. I am sad about this. But this is the way people feel…”

Farrugia also said that by increasing their remuneration, the Prime Minister had exposed himself to the charge made by Lino Spiteri of ‘buying silence even from the Opposition benches’.

“I’m only quoting Spiteri… I’m not saying this is the case,” Farrugia says. “But it’s one of the worse aspect of right-wing politics, that of thinking that one can do anything one likes with money.”

Farrugia, referring to the ongoing debate on divorce, was adamant in stating that the PN’s identity was not based on moral conservatism, but on Christian-democratic values of social justice. “I am a Christian-democrat and a Catholic. But I am not a moral   conservative. The Nationalist Party I know is not confessional. It is a party which whenever confronted by an issue it does not stop from studying and tackling it…”

Read full interview in MaltaToday's digital newspaper