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By a staff reporter
An electronic message from a senior party official at central office in Pietà was succinct and explicit. It informed all the PN candidates that they should not mention Arnold Cassola or Alternattiva Demokratika at any point in their speeches at the extraordinary meeting at the Pietà HQ held yesterday evening.
The panic that struck PN central office has now brought a shift in strategy from one of attacking the perceived enemy to ignoring it completely. PN polls reportedly talk of a 5 to 8 percent rating for Arnold Cassola.
Strategy meetings held at Pietà and chaired by Joe Saliba the PN’s secretary general, have finally come to terms with the fact that the abortion scare on Alternattiva has seriously backfired creating more sympathy for the Greens.
Senior officials said that it was a bad decision and such a mistake would not have happened if “Eddie was around.”
Many candidates have expressed privately that they did not agree with the abortion argument, though Simon Busuttil has stuck to his guns arguing forcefully that the argumentation was right, but unduly misconstrued by the media.
The campaigning for the EU parliament elections has led many parliamentarians on both sides of the divide to lament that there have been too many elections.
Certain ministers have told MaltaToday that Malta needs a break from campaigning and some of them also advocate re-scheduling all the local council elections to one date to avoid annual election campaigns.
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