Claudette Buttigieg says she will not seek re-election
She was first elected to parliament in 2013
Nationalist MP Claudette Buttiġieġ has announced she will not seek re-election.
She made the announcement in a Facebook post, pointing out that she was making the announcement now, before the new PN leader is appointed, so that no one would equate her decision with whoever was elected.
She said she will continue to serve in the House until the next general election is held.
Buttigieg has been an MP since 2013, with Naxxar being her electoral base. She was also elected on her own steam in 2017 but barely scraped through in 2022, making it to the House on the strength of the newly introduced gender quota to increase the representation of women in parliament.
In April, she told Times of Malta that she would refuse to be elected again through the gender-quota mechanism because she felt women were being “used as a token” of equality.
“This was a box-ticking exercise, and on a national level, no additional initiatives were taken to encourage more women to contest the coming elections… Come next election, I will definitely refuse to be elected through this mechanism again,” she said.
Buttiġieġ is a senior executive officer at the Malta University Research Trust. A former Malta Eurovision Song Contest winner, she lectured on marketing and was a popular TV presenter.
Her announcement comes a week after PN leader Bernard Grech announced he was stepping down.
She is the second Nationalist MP to decide against seeking re-election. Ivan J. Bartolo made a similar announcement in March.