Cyrus Engerer is the first person to throw his hat into the ring for the European Parliament seat vacated by Miriam Dalli.

In a statement, the Electoral Commission said that Engerer had presented his nomination for the seat today.

Engerer is the favourite to land Dalli’s seat – which was vacated after Labour’s leading MEP gave it up to return to Malta – having been eliminated last in the race for the sixth MEP seat in the 2019 elections.

Engerer polled 5,394 first-count votes in the 2019 MEP election, the fifth highest after Dalli, Alfred Sant, Alex Agius Saliba and Josianne Cutajar, who all ended up getting elected.

Engerer started his political career with the Nationalist Party, and served as deputy mayor in Sliema before defecting to the Labour Party in 2011.

He was initially a Labour candidate for the MEP election in 2014, but withdrew after he was sentenced to two years in prison, suspended for two years, on charges of distributing pornography.

He subsequently became former Prime Minister Joseph Muscat’s special envoy in Brussels, a post which he left in May 2018 after announcing that he would contest in the 2019 MEP election.