Did you know that, since the first election in 1921, 3,870 people have contested parliamentary seats, but only 359 of them actually made it to the House of Representatives?

This is just one example of the statistics that can be found on the maltadata.com website, which gives a detailed account of all the elections that have taken place since the people of Malta were granted the right to have their own Parliament.

Last week, Parliament celebrated 90 years of existence and to mark the occasion there was a special session in the Tapestry Chamber in the Palace in Valletta, where the first sitting was held.

The Clerk of the House, Pauline Abela, told this newspaper that a sitting on 29 October 1921 is shown in the records as being a preliminary meeting of the legislative assembly, while a meeting held two days later, on 1 November, is listed as a joint meeting between the assembly and the senate.

The sitting recorded as being Number One is the one which was held on 15 November 1921.

There were 32 members in that first Parliament, and the number stayed the same until the Second World War, when it fell to just 10 in 1939 and 1945, only to shoot up again to 40 in 1947 and 50 in 1962. The first time we had an odd number of MPs – and “odd” here refers to the number, not to the MPs – was in 1971, when 55 members were elected.

Since the following election, held in 1976, the number of MPs in the House has stood at 65, or 69 when, on three occasions, constitutional amendments came into force as the party winning the majority of votes needed extra seats to have a parliamentary majority of one.

Considering the size of our population, our Parliament is one of the largest, as each MP represents just over 6,300 people. In the United Kingdom and Italy, just to give two examples, an MP represents an average of 95,000 constituents.

Since 1921, 21 parties have contested the 22 elections held, but only 11 of them have managed to win seats. Since 1966, we have had a two-party representation in Parliament, with only Nationalist Party and the Labour Party candidates making it to Parliament.

The election with the highest number of candidates was the one in 1962, when 230 candidates contested a total of 302 seats.

In 1921, with only men allowed to vote, the number of voters was a mere 27,404. Women voted for the first time in 1947, when 140,703 voters were eligible. This number has increased at every subsequent election to reach 315, 317 in 2008 – the first time that the 300,000 figure was surpassed.