Last updated 1.47pm with Zelensky's congratulations
Roberta Metsola was overwhelmingly re-elected as president of the European Parliament on Tuesday, securing a second term after fending off a last-minute challenge from Spanish MEP Irene Montero.
Metsola won 562 votes of the 623 votes cast. Her rival got 61. The remaining votes were invalid.
It was the strongest vote ever for an EP president, observers said.
The result was greeted with rapturous applause. EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen congratulated Metsola saying the election was fully deserved.
"Your leadership and passion for Europe is more needed than ever," she wrote on X.
Among the minority who abstained from the vote were Labour MEPs Alex Agius Saliba and Daniel Attard, in contrast to party leader and Prime Minister Robert Abela's support for Metsola.
Metsola said she accepted the appointment with humility and promised to work every day to meet the expectations of the people and make Europe accessible to all and a better place.
She paid tribute to all those who had helped create and shape the European Union and its democratic principles and standards including rule of law and equality.
"Ours must be a Europe that remembers, that learns from past struggles and recognises the fight of so many who stood for the ideals we sometimes take for granted," she said in her victory speech.
"For all those who were displaced, who were disappeared, for those who stood in front of tanks and bullets on the path away from the totalitarianism that took over so much of Europe for so long. For all those who believed in better and who dared to dream. Ours must be a Europe that Adenauer, Mitterand, Wałęsa, Fenech Adami, Havel, Veil, Falcone, Borsellino would all be proud of," she said.
She underlined the importance of the EU having strategic independence, stability, global competitiveness and said the EU also needed to offer real solutions on climate change.
Unity
She also underscored the importance of unity.
"Polarisation in our societies has led to more confrontational politics, even political violence," she said. "The easy answers that divide our communities into 'us' and 'them'. We need to move beyond this zero-sum thinking that has excluded people, that turns people away."
She said that the European Parliament stood for the opposite, as a counter to autocracy and support for equality.
Metsola told the MEPS that they shared a responsibility to leave Europe a better place than the one they found.
Security
"We will leave Europe a better place by creating a new security and defence framework that keeps people safe and pushes back against the expansionist dreams of dictators in our neighbourhood," she stressed.
The MEPs would also leave Europe a better place when they finally managed to implement proper migration and asylum legislation, Metsola added.
"That includes necessary border management, with a returns policy and above all, that is human centric. That ensures that no other mother is given no choice but to put her child into a rickety boat in the hands of criminal trafficking networks. That guarantees that Europe is able to live up to its historic and proud legacy."
Ukraine and the Middle East
Metsola said the Russian war of aggression against sovereign Ukraine remained at the top of the EP's agenda.
"We will be called upon to do more. We must be ready to go beyond what is comfortable and do what is necessary. We do this because Europe must stand for freedom. For peace - a real peace with justice, with dignity and with liberty.
"Because in Europe, we understand how to heal seemingly impossible divides. That must also be the guiding philosophy of our reaction to the conflict in the Middle East, where even in the fog of war ours must continue to be the voice of humanity pushing for an end to the intergenerational cycle of violence, for a two-State Solution, a sustainable peace and the return of those hostages still taken."
The Maltese MEP was nominated by the European People’s Party, the biggest group in the parliament, and appears to have won support from several other groups.
Congratulations from Malta
Anġlu Farrugia, Speaker of the Maltese parliament in a brief statement said he had "noted with pleasure" Metsola's re-election to the prestigious post of EU president.
Foreign Minister Ian Borg also offered his congratulations.
He said 2024 was "indeed a historic year for Malta, with our seat on the UN Security Council, the 2024 Maltese Chairpersonship of the OSCE, and a Maltese MEP leading the European Parliament.
"It is now time for all of us to commit to Malta’s long-standing dedication to peace, tolerance, and justice. Together, we must work to end wars and violence and promote peace above all else, in Europe and beyond," he wrote on X.
PN leader Bernard Grech said Metsola had always elevated Malta’s name in the European institutions and she was a worthy representative for the Maltese in the name of the Nationalist Party.
“I have no doubt she has the right skills to keep serving as EP president who seeks the common good before everything else,” Grech said.
Metsola's overwhelming victory in figures.Zelensky's congratulations
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky congratulated Metsola. "I greatly appreciate President Metsola's personal involvement in supporting Ukraine, as well as her unwavering commitment to protecting people and upholding our European way of life," he wrote.
Euronews praised Metsola before the vote, saying the Maltese MEP had managed to draw consensus from across the parliament’s fractious political divides at a time when ideological rifts seemed deeper than ever in the parliament’s hemicycle.
Metsola was the youngest MEP to head the European Parliament when she was elected president for the first time in 2022 after winning 458 votes out of 690 in the first round of voting.
Euronews credited her with steering the parliament through one of the most tumultuous periods in its 70-year history - including the eruption of war on Europe's doorstep and the most explosive corruption scandal to ever hit the institution.
Several parliamentary sources told Euronews that her performance over the past two years has seen her brush off initial qualms about her candidature, which were mainly centred around her anti-abortion views.
"At the beginning of her term, I was sceptical because of the stance of her national (Nationalist) party against abortion rights. I was afraid we would have a very Conservative lady in the presidency," a Green MEP re-elected to the chamber in June's European election told the broadcaster.
Metsola has been an MEP since 2013, having been elected on the Nationalist Party ticket. She previously worked within the Permanent Representation of Malta to the European Union and later as the legal advisor to the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.
In June she was re-elected to the parliament with a Maltese record of 87,473 first-preference votes. Her new term will continue until 2027.