Candidates who contested under the Labour Party ticket blitzed their Nationalist Party counterparts when it came to spending on their 2022 general election campaign, data released by the Electoral Commission shows.
An analysis conducted by The Malta Independent into the financial returns submitted by all of the people who stood for election last March shows who the big spenders, and who the more frugal candidates were during the five-week campaign.
Amongst the conclusions which can be drawn, it is clear that those who contested under the PL’s ticket spent far more than those who contested under the PN’s ticket.
The data shows that the Labour Party’s elected candidates blitzed their Nationalist Party counterparts when it came to electoral spending.
The 43 candidates who were elected to the PL’s benches spent a total of €635,285.86 between them – which works out to an average of €14,774.09 per candidate.
Meanwhile, the PN’s 34 elected candidates spent a total of €183,689 – which works out to an average of €5,403 per candidate, significantly lower than the average amount of money spent by PL candidates.
The caveat here is that the data for spending by Ivan J. Bartolo was not available in the batch of documents which were provided by the Electoral Commissioner.
According to the General Elections Act, candidates may not spend more than €20,000 for every district which they contest and must submit receipts and bills to confirm their expenses. They must also register their incomes during the campaign.
The data shows that none of the candidates exceeded the €20,000 per district threshold established by law – meaning that in the eyes of the law, all of them have the green light.
Anybody who would have exceeded the threshold would have been liable to a fine of up to €465 and risk possibly being struck off the electoral register for up to four years.
The data was published by the Electoral Commission on Monday.
The big spenders
There were a number of big spenders on the campaign trail: five candidates exceeded €30,000 in their spending throughout the electoral campaign.
Roderick Galdes takes the prize of having spent most money throughout the electoral campaign. He spent a grand total of €38,933.35 throughout the campaign, but made up for it by receiving a total of €40,712.83 from various fundraising activities.
New Gozitan MP JoEtienne Abela is the next biggest spender, having shelled out €35,857.32 during the campaign, followed by now Foreign Affairs Minister Ian Borg, who spent a cool €33,189.99 during his electoral campaign.
New PN MP Joe Giglio spent €31,713.12 during his campaign – which is almost triple the next highest amount spent by a PN candidate – while Silvio Schembri spent a similar €31,124.76.
A number of other PL candidates put a significant amount of money into their campaigns as well.
New candidate Ray Abela spent €29,408.68 throughout his extensive campaign – a campaign which almost fell flat as Abela was only elected in a casual election – while Aaron Farrugia spent €28,286.84 on his campaign, which perhaps did not go as totally intended given that the new Transport Minister was only elected (barely) from one district.
Miriam Dalli spent €23,421.99 on her campaign, Clifton Grima spent €23,663 on his campaign, and Owen Bonnici spent €22,040.77 on his electoral bid.
Clyde Caruana, Chris Fearne, Michael Farrugia, and Alex Muscat all spent more than €20,000 each in their campaigns as well.
All of these candidates contested on two electoral districts, meaning that the maximum amount of money they could spend as part of their campaign was of €40,000.
An honourable mention among the big PL spenders is Gozo Minister Clint Camilleri. He could only spend €20,000 in his campaign because he contested on a single district (which was the 13th district), and in fact his returns show that he pushed that number quite close by spending €19,302.38.
This comes after questions were raised about Camilleri’s particularly lavish electoral campaign, where he hosted five rallies in Gozo complete with entertainment and free food while also commissioning a video about Camilleri’s political career.
On the PN’s side meanwhile, besides Giglio, nobody got anywhere near the amount of spending as the aforementioned PL candidates.
Indeed, there were only three candidates who spent more than €10,000 in their campaigns – these were Mark Anthony Sammut (who spent €14,590), Ryan Callus (who spent €10,639.75) and Ivan Castillo (who spent €10,480.86).
Mario DeMarco was close, spending €9,324.70, while former PN leader Adrian Delia spent €8,813 on his campaign – but other than them, many of the remaining PN candidates spent between €3,000 and €5,000 on their campaigns.
Frugality is the name of the game
On the other end of the spectrum meanwhile, there are a couple of scenarios which prove that you don’t need much in the way of money in order to carry out a successful campaign.
The most obvious example of this is the PN’s 18-year-old Eve Borg Bonello, who became Malta’s youngest ever MP courtesy of the gender corrective mechanism after a month-long campaign which saw only €253.20 spent.
Former Rabat mayor Charles Azzopardi, who defected from the PL and joined the PN, was also particularly frugal in his spending: his campaign cost just €758.91. Likewise, Janice Chetcuti – who raised some controversy after not contesting a casual election while knowing she would be elected through the gender corrective mechanism – only spent €870 on her campaign.
A couple of the PN’s more-established candidates also kept their wallets quite firmly shut compared to their counterparts.
Veteran MP Robert Arrigo spent just €1,344.22 during his campaign, while popular family doctor Stephen Spiteri got by with just €1,500 being spent. Both of them were elected on the two districts which they contested, showing that sometimes it doesn’t really matter how much money you spend if your reputation with voters precedes you.
Meanwhile on the PL’s side, the term frugality has a different contextual meaning to what it means among PN candidates.
Out of those who were elected on the PL ticket, Deo Debattista was the most frugal spender, spending €3,181.11 on his campaign.
That figure is still higher than the figure spent by nine PN candidates in their respective campaigns.
Katya De Giovanni – a surprise winner in the casual elections – meanwhile spent €3,418.93 in her campaign and veteran MP Chris Agius spent €3,600.
Amanda Spiteri Grech – elected by gender quota – and Mqabba mayor Omar Farrugia spent slightly more than that - €4,097.45 and €4,208.54 respectively – but the majority of the rest of the PL field spent anywhere between €8,000 and €15,000 on their campaigns.
The party leader conundrum
The one major discrepancy from the candidates’ returns is in the PN and the PL’s party leaders.
Both Robert Abela and Bernard Grech declared that they had neither received anything nor spent anything on their own electoral campaign.
That is easy to believe in a way, given that they were the faces of each of their respective party’s electoral campaign.
However it also raises some questions, given that both the PL and the PN used Robert Abela’s and Bernard Grech’s Facebook pages respectively as part of their grander electoral campaign.
The amount of money thrown into those Facebook pages for advertising has not been listed as part of the candidate returns – even though those same Facebook pages are in Abela and Grech’s names.
The big spenders who didn’t make the grade
Any election has winners and losers – and that goes beyond the political party divide.
The candidate returns include those of the people who did not make it into Parliament, and it shows that some people will have been left smarting not just because they failed to be elected, but because of the hole the electoral campaign left in their respective wallets.
On the PL’s side, new candidate Edward Cassar Delia was one of the biggest spenders out of those who failed to be elected. He spent €18,308.42 on his electoral campaign, but that only translated into 71 first count votes and 108 first count votes on the two districts which he contested in.
He was outspent marginally by James Grech (€18,393) and Jose Herrera (€18,822) who both failed to be elected. Grech was considerably closer, only missing out marginally in a casual election, while Herrera lost his long-time parliament seat and retired from politics as a result.
Jean Claude Micallef – who lost out on a seat in Parliament by just 19 votes during the casual election on his home district – spent €14,550 on his campaign, while Evarist Bartolo spent €15,959 on his campaign.
Bartolo was not elected but was deprived of an almost certain seat in Parliament via a casual election after the PL opted to instruct Michael Falzon and Clifton Grima to vacate their seats on another district. Rebecca Buttigieg was elected by casual election as a result, and Randolph Debattista was co-opted into Parliament because there was nobody else who could stand for a casual election in that district.
On the PN’s side meanwhile, the two outliers are Alex Perici Calascione, who spent €9,295.80 on his electoral campaign, and Francine Farrugia, who spent €8,402.70 on her campaign. Both were not elected into parliament.
Former MP Maria Deguara spent €5,314.63 on her campaign, while Swieqi mayor Noel Muscat, MZPN President Joe Grech, and teacher Stefan Caruana all spent over €4,000 each on their own unsuccessful campaigns to be elected.