The Nationalist Party continues to perform poorly in political surveys in part because the game is rigged to favour the incumbent Labour government, Nationalist Party leader Bernard Grech argued on Saturday.

Poll numbers suggest that the PN is on track for a record electoral drubbing, with the most recent survey, released last week by Times of Malta, putting Labour 47,000 votes ahead of the PN.

Speaking on Saturday, Grech downplayed the importance of such polls, arguing that they provided a snapshot of voters’ intentions at a given point in time and were not a plebiscite on the state of the PN.

But he also argued that the PN was failing to resonate with voters because it was competing on uneven terms.

He likened the situation to a corrupted football game, in which the referee, supporters and stadium announcer are all backing the other side. In Grech’s metaphor, public broadcaster PBS serves as the referee.

“If the game is not fair, let us not fool ourselves into thinking that there will be any extraordinary progress. This is a government that is not allowing the game to be played as it should be,” he said.

Grech made a similar point earlier this week, saying that the government was engaged in a "vote-buying" exercise.

PBS went out of its way to give ministers and government MPs airtime, Grech argued, reiterating a long-standing complaint within the PN about inequality of arms in public broadcasting.

The Labour Party government was also dipping into public coffers to finance its propaganda efforts, he said, citing by way of example a €1 million outlay to promote its Budget 2022 measures. 

The Broadcasting Authority last month ordered PBS to give the PN 15 minutes of free advertising during prime time, to make up for political propaganda aired following the budget. 

Grech insisted that there was no comparison to the situation before 2013, arguing that the Labour administration was wielding its power to its own advantage at unprecedented levels.

The PN leader was speaking during an interview on Radio 103 with host and university academic Andrew Azzopardi.

Grech on cannabis

Grech acknowledged internal party disagreement over the PN’s stance on cannabis reform, but downplayed it, arguing that “every family has its discussions”.

“Even the Labour Party has internal issues. The fact that they are not made public does not mean they do not exist,” he said.

The PN did not engage in public discussion about plans to reform cannabis laws and did not take part in a public consultation process about a reform bill.

Grech had then indicated that he favoured plans to provide users with a legal pathway to acquire cannabis – only for the PN to then announce that it was totally opposed to the reform plans.

The reform bill is now in the final stage of parliamentary approval.

Speaking on Saturday, Grech argued that the PN had kept quiet about the issue because it was still consulting with experts and stakeholders at the time. The reform, he argued, was being pushed forward by the government and was, in the grand scheme of things, a distraction.

Labour asked PN to help campaign against greylisting

The real issue of concern, he said, was Malta having been placed on the FATF greylist.

Grech revealed that the Labour Party had approached the PN in January with a request to join forces for an international roadshow to campaign for Malta to be kept off the FATF greylist.

He said the PN was willing to do so, but the offer was never followed up.

In the run-up to the greylisting, Finance Minister Clyde Caruana flew to Berlin to lobby for Malta to be kept off the grey list, while Grech wrote to the head of the FATF to argue that greylisting to punish the “transgressions of some, who should have known better” would end up hurting local business owners.

Grech's caravan hobby

The PN leader also revealed that he is a caravan lover, and unwinds in his spare time by spending time in a caravan placed, he was quick to note, in permitted caravan sites against payment. 

Grech argued that Malta could do more to combat climate change - by seriously tackling traffic emissions, and by doing much more to harvest rainwater that fell during periods of heavy rain, as experienced in the past weeks.