The Labour Party swept their opponents aside after obtaining a staggering 47 local councils out of 68, along with a huge margin of 47,100 votes – some 5,000 (2%) more than that in the MEP elections – leaving the Nationalists with just 19 councils across Malta and Gozo, with another two remaining split.
The PL had every reason to celebrate after Friday’s counting ended. The party has, traditionally, always performed well in local council elections; but given the nature of these elections, as the first in which all localities went to the polls at once, the result has only served to pile further misery on an already beleaguered PN, putting more pressure on its leader, Adrian Delia.
Throughout the three-day counting process, PL party agents could often be seen banging against the Perspex glass in jubilation and chanting the name of their leader, with PN agents reduced to celebrating victories such as those in Sliema, where a PN majority was guaranteed due to a lack of PL candidates, and St Julian’s.
The official numbers read that the PL won 150,514 votes – equating to 57.96% – while the PN won 103,398 votes – equating to 39.82%. Alternattiva Demokratika was the third best performing party, receiving 1,997 votes, followed by Partit Demokratiku, with 837 votes, and Moviment Patrijotti Maltin, which garnered just 376 votes. Independent candidates and parties received a total of 2,552 votes.
The PL won a total of 268 seats on offer, while the PN won 192. Independent candidates won the remaining four seats – leaving the three smaller parties with nothing.
While there were a number of councils where the winner was already known due to one of the two major parties not fielding enough candidates to make up a seat majority, there were a number of others which were pegged as battlegrounds. In this respect, the PL won battle after battle.
Five localities, in fact, made the switch from PN to PL. St Paul’s Bay, which had been touted as the locality to really watch, saw a swing of over 600 votes, as the PL transformed a 62-vote deficit in the 2015 elections (when the locality had swapped from PL to PN) into a 584-vote majority – equating to a 7.28% gap.
Mosta – another major locality – also went to the PL from the PN for the first time since 2007, with the former winning 51.43% of the votes on offer, translating to a 341-vote majority. San Gwann was also lost – although, ironically, the PN actually performed better there in terms of votes than they did in the last elections. In 2013, the PN had won five seats to the PL’s four, but had done so only due to Malta’s vote inheritance system after they got 148 votes fewer than the PL. This year, that gap actually almost halved to 87 votes but, unfortunately for the PN, the inheritance of votes was not as kind as it was six years ago.
The two other localities to swap allegiances were all the more momentous in terms of their magnitude, however. The PL had never won local council elections in Siġġiewi or Valletta until this week. Siġġiewi was won by just 70 votes, while the capital was secured with a 252-vote margin, equivalent to a 7.1% gap.
The PN can take scant consolation from winning Munxar back from the PL – especially given that the PL mayor and deputy mayor had resigned from the council in 2018, leaving the PN leading the council with a two-seat majority. In fact, the party’s performance in Gozo is probably the only place where the PN can draw some positives; the PN extended its advantage in Nadur and Kerċem and convincingly kept hold of Victoria and Għajnsielem, among others.
However, the party still cannot look at Gozo with anything close to complete satisfaction; the PN lost its majority in Fontana, only just managing to hold onto its third seat (four votes on the last count were the difference); while two localities whose councils have always been in the hands of the PN also ended up split due to the independent candidatures of Nicky Saliba and David Apap Agius in Żebbuġ and Għarb respectively. Both had served as long-term mayors in their locality – Apap Agius for 21 years, in fact – having been elected under the PN ticket, but this time decided to move away from party lines. Saliba contested alone and was elected with 15.2% of first preference votes, while Apap Agius contested under the banner of Gharb L-Ewwel with two other candidates, scooping up 42.86% of first preference votes and leaving the PN with just 12.33%. He was elected along with fellow Għarb L-Ewwel candidate Miriam Borg.
There were various other battlegrounds that the PN would have been hoping to make headway in. Mtarfa and Msida were certainly on its radar, given that they swung to the PL with the slimmest of margins – five and 27 votes respectively – in the last elections; but the PL managed to increase its advantage in both localities, with the party registering an impressive 13% increase in support in Mtarfa. It was a similar story in localities such as Birkirkara and Pietà, the latter seeing an 18% increase in support for the PL. It was only in Mellieħa that the PN managed to close the gap, where it failed to win a majority by just 77 votes.
The disappointment, however, was not only reserved for the PN. Both PD and AD failed to win any seats, despite fielding a total of 15 candidates.
AD had previously held two local council seats, and while the party expected to lose its seat in Sliema – occupied by former chairperson Michael Briguglio – it will be a source of disappointment that long-time councillor Ralph Cassar lost his seat on the Attard Local Council. Cassar was still the party’s best performer, polling at 5.73%, followed by Luke Joe Caruana with 4.4% in Mellieħa, and James Gabaretta and Daniel Desira, who both polled 4.13% in Naxxar and Marsaskala respectively.
PD’s local campaign, meanwhile, can only be described as a disaster. With no strategy to rival that which saw Marlene Farrugia elected on the 10th district in the 2017 general election, the party must now go back to drawing board. Only Karen Freeman and Timothy Alden (who technically contested as an independent candidate) managed to exceed 100 first preference votes, with Alden eliminated on the 10th count in Sliema, and Freeman coming within 98 votes of being elected on the final count in St Paul’s Bay.
This is not to say that independent candidates cannot succeed, however, as shown by AD’s own Ralph Cassar, together with 23-year-old Steve Zammit Lupi, who stood as an independent candidate and obtained 947 first preference votes in Żebbuġ (Malta) – more than enough to secure a seat on the first count and enough to make him the candidate with the third most first preference votes in the whole locality.
All in all, it was a campaign that brought near unprecedented success to the PL and further discomfort to the PN. As the pressure mounts on Delia, the party must see the results for what they are: a condemnation of the party – even at a local level – by the electorate. If the PN does not conduct such an exercise it would, in the words of former PN executive committee president Mark Anthony Sammut, be a refusal to face a reality where the people have, by and large, lost confidence in the PN.