Tiffany Abela-Wadge has withdrawn her Nationalist Party candidature for the general election after admitting that she feels disconnected from the party.
In a Facebook post on Monday, Abela-Wadge publicly announced that a few weeks ago she had resigned from contesting the election on districts nine and 10, as she felt disconnected from the Nationalist Party and unable to contribute to the party’s political direction.
“I feel disconnected from the party, I don’t feel like I can contribute to anything the party wants to steer into right now, and the party seems to want to steer clear of my way of politics- that of working with the opposite side to bring about a change from within rather than always fighting, always complaining and never agreeing with what the government is doing,” she wrote on Facebook.
She went on to say that the Labour government was here to stay because apart from it listening to the electorate and responding to them, it also enjoyed "the lack of effective opposition."
Abela-Wadge said that she had tried to speak up about women’s issues and health, but was shut down.
“I am not a woman who would shut up and toe the party line even when the party is simply not talking about the subject at hand, and that’s why I decided to step down.”
She said that her fight to have a proper healthcare system that covers all women’s health-related issues would now take a different route. She said she will not be joining the Labour Party, but that she has now taken a "step back" from politics.
Abela-Wadge, whose husband Alan served as PN councillor, also made reference to a MaltaToday survey published on Sunday which showed an almost 40,000 vote gap between the PN and PL.
“Those results show that I’m indeed not the only one who feels like the PN doesn’t represent me anymore,” she said.
News of her resignation as an electoral candidate comes after the Nationalist Party cancelled a meeting to discuss a Facebook spate between former leader Adrian Delia and fellow MP Jason Azzopardi.
The meeting was cancelled after the MPs issued a joint statement committing themselves to focus their energies on the good of the party
The issue sparked after Azzopardi won a libel case he instituted against a supported of Delia. In reaction, Delia called on Azzopardi to publish messages he claimed to have linking him to murder suspect Yorgen Fenech and explain how he had access to them since he is not a member of the police. He also challenged Azzopardi to take him to court.