Nationalist Party MP Hermann Schiavone has offered to give up his parliamentary seat, should family lawyer Bernard Grech be elected its new leader. 

In a Facebook post on Monday, Schiavone, elected on the fifth electoral district, said he was willing to give up his seat to Grech if the party asked him to do it. 

Schiavone had made the same offer in 2017 when he had offered to give up his seat for PN leader Adrian Delia. 

“If the party asks me to give up the parliamentary seat for the Leader of the Party, I am ready to do this as I was ready to do the same three years ago because my main interest remains to strengthen the Nationalist Party, so that our country can have a strong opposition and an alternative government,” he said in a post on Facebook on Monday. 

Schiavone's Facebook post

The PN will most probably face a two-horse leadership race, with incumbent Delia and Grech the only two people to have said so far that they intend to contest. Applications close at 3pm on Monday. 

Grech is a political outsider who has never run for election. Should he win the PN leadership contest, as polls suggest he is on track to do, he would need one of the party's MPs to give up their seat in order for him to enter parliament and be appointed opposition leader.  

The path would mirror that of Delia, who was also not an MP when he won the PN leadership in 2017. At the time, PN MP Jean-Pierre Debono had renounced his seat to allow Delia to enter parliament. 

Schiavone suspended himself from the parliamentary group in April 2019 after it emerged he and general council president Kristy Debono, also an MP, met Tumas Group CEO Yorgen Fenech, who also owns Dubai company 17 Black. Fenech was later charged with being the mastermind of the Daphne Caruana Galizia murder. 

An internal inquiry had later found that Schiavone had broken no party rules by meeting Fenech over a sponsorship request and he was reinstated within the parliamentary group.