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MALTATODAY 19 May 2019

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12 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 19 MAY 2019 NO government is at stake in European elections, which in Malta will elect six MEPs from a host of candidates, most of whom contest under the um- brella of a European political family. But with European elections coinciding with local elections, and held two years after La- bour's re-election in 2017, they are undeniably Joseph Muscat's and Labour's mid-term test. In- deed, these were appointments during which pale blue voters often used to send a protest vote to Nationalist administra- tions. But Labour this time is avert- ing this prospect with Muscat's presentation of the MEP elec- tions as a direct contest be- tween him and Adrian Delia, in full comfort of polls showing an unassailable trust lead. It is a tactic aimed at pale red voters who despite their misgivings on Labour's record, still prefer Muscat to Delia and Labour to the PN. It is also aimed at complacent Labour voters who may abstain simply because the country's government is not at stake, in the full knowledge that Labour is bound to win with a huge margin. The downside for democracy is that the projection of MEP and local elections into a re- hashed general election, actu- ally diminishes the power of voters to clip the wings of the government in office, making it more liable to listen to their concerns after the polls close. One advantage for Labour is that the PN's refusal to frame these elections into a presiden- tial contest, comes across as cowardly. In their first debate, Delia looked weak when mak- ing the point that these elec- tions are not a contest between himself and Muscat, simply because Muscat was effectively using the debate to project the contest as one between the two politicians. This left PN strat- egists at a loss. This explains why Delia is now so keen to emphasise Muscat's refusal to confront him on Xarabank, even if a final confrontation will be taking place in the more sanitised environment of a Broadcasting Authority debate. But instead of emphasising the PN's main strength in these elections – the fact that despite all the problems it faces, it has still presented a decent team of candidates with a degree of competence – it has now gone into overdrive to find a unitary battle-cry to galvanise its tradi- tional voting base without rely- ing exclusively on the tried and tested corruption issue. This may explain why Delia has now played the abortion card, despite fully knowing that MEPs have no say on its intro- duction in Malta. The last bastion of party identity The PN's logic can be ex- plained by polls showing a vast majority of the Maltese being against the legalisation of abor- tion. Yet in the absence of any in- dication that a future Labour government intends to legalise abortion, it is hard to project the contest between the two main parties as being one about abortion. One cannot simply invent an issue which com- mands majority support on the eve of an election in the ab- sence of any real threat to the voting base one is appealing to. Sure enough there are indica- tions that Labour candidates are less obsessed with the issue, and that Labour has a slightly larger minority of pro-choice voters than the PN. In this sense the PN may well have reaped some benefits among the conservative cohort of voters by emphasising its candidates' unequivocal stance against abortion, in a context where reproductive rights form part of the European Social- ists' platform, of which Labour forms part. Yet even here the PN should be cautious. It was the Irish Fine Gael, a member of the EPP, which actually proposed the law which legalised abor- tion in Ireland in 2018. Moreo- ver, even conservatives may be appalled by the PN's strategy. By pushing the issue too hard, the PN actually risks putting the pro-life cause in jeopardy: for if the election is a referen- dum on abortion, how would one interpret the result if the PN loses by a large margin? Would this mean that voters have in any way endorsed abor- tion? The PN is also sending a mes- sage to pro-choice voters, even those inclined to vote for it for other reasons, that the party does not even want their vote. While the liberal minority may be numerically small in the NEWS EUROPEAN ELECTIONS For Labour, MEP elections are a presidential contest between Muscat and Delia while for the PN these elections are now "a referendum on abortion." What does this say on the identity of both major parties? James Debono asks A presidential contest or an abortion referendum? 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