Three of the four Labour Party candidates who were elected in the last European Parliament elections in 2019 will not have their name on the ballot sheet in June.
The latest Labour MEP to say she will not be contesting is Josianne Cutajar who, after a single term in Brussels, has decided to call it a day. She was the first Gozitan to make it to Europe, and the youngest too, but in a post on Facebook last Monday she said it is time for her to step aside.
Two other Labour candidates who we already knew would not be contesting are Miriam Dalli, who resigned her post in 2020 when she was called back by Prime Minister Robert Abela to serve as a minister in his Cabinet, and Alfred Sant, who made it clear quite some time ago that his experience as an MEP will finish at the end of this EP term.
Of the four Labour candidates who were elected, only Alex Agius Saliba will seek another five-year stint as an MEP. The other Labour MEP, Cyrus Engerer, who replaced Miriam Dalli in a casual election which followed her resignation, is still to announce his intentions.
That Dalli, Sant and Cutajar will not be contesting opens up a void which new candidates will have to fill, making the race to elect Labour’s representatives an open one. Dalli and Sant were the first favourites in 2019, but their absence, together with that of Cutajar, will now make anything possible in the Labour camp.
Let us remember that Dalli, in the last round, set a record with 63,438 first preferences, while Alfred Sant garnered 26,592 votes and Cutajar 15,603. Put together, that makes up 105,633 voters, which is nearly three-fourths of the Labour first-count vote.
The new candidates to contest on Labour’s behalf will be fighting for those votes and, it must be said, it will get tougher as we get closer to the date when the decision will be made.
This is a completely different scenario to the one we have on the Nationalist side. Here, Roberta Metsola, whose stature in this term rose exponentially when she became the EP President, and long-standing MEP David Casa, who has been elected in all EP elections held since the first one was held in 2004, are firm favourites to retain their seat.
The other candidates will be hoping that the party will manage to grab the third seat – a target that was set by Opposition Leader Bernard Grech last Sunday. They will have to fight for that one, banking not only on the first preferences they seek to pick up, but also on the number twos and threes which, in our electoral system, are equally important when one of the candidates – in this case Metsola – are likely to collect many more votes than required to be elected.
As things stand now, and if the 4-2 scenario is maintained, there is the possibility that Labour will have a completely new team at the EP in June, while the Nationalist Party will have the same faces.