On the sidelines of this week’s major events and speeches at the European Parliament, the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, was ambushed by journalist and researcher Alessandro Marcia and asked about abortion and LGBT rights.
She was taken by surprise and ended up on the defensive, saying that she supports LGBT rights but was ultimately evasive on the issue of abortion.
Alessandro Marcia asked her what her positions were on these issues, saying that she had evolved on them from when she first campaigned for the European Parliament.
President Metsola told him that locally there was a caricature built around her which she disagreed with, and she said that, as a woman, her campaign in Malta was very difficult.
She didn’t give a reply on her position on abortion, though.
What I get from her answer and her reluctance to explicitly state her support for abortion rights for women, even in Brussels with foreigners, is that she is very wary of local scrutiny of her on this issue. She has made it clear that she doesn’t want to come back to Malta to take on a leading role in the Nationalist Party, but she still hasn’t burnt this card entirely, as the local political dialectic is still preconditioning her positions abroad — or at least her talk about these positions.
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