We are steadily moving towards the time when the Maltese and Gozitans will be asked to elect their six representatives at the European Parliament. They will also be asked to vote to elect their local councils for the next five years.

Both parties are gearing up for 8 June, when both elections will be held simultaneously.

One good thing about scheduling the MEP and local council elections in one go and at the same time is that we no longer have an election every year, as used to be the case when local councils were first set up in the 1990s. Older generations will remember that, for a number of years, we had an election of one-third of local councils every March, putting the country in election mode on a yearly basis.

That these elections have been now grouped together and fall midway through a legislature gives political parties the chance to gauge themselves. The last general election took place in 2022 and the next one is slated for 2027, and therefore the MEP and local elections fall right in the middle of the five-year term of the government.

Next June’s elections are the best “survey” that the political parties could get about their performance since the last election. Media houses have taken the habit of holding surveys every now and again, drawing a picture of what the Maltese electorate is thinking. But it is only a real election that gives the best indication of what public sentiment is.

Although an MEP/local council election is a different beast when compared to a general election, the indications will be there for all to see. It will establish whether the Labour Party has gained or lost ground since 2022, and it will give the Nationalist Party food for thought on the second half of the legislature.

The PN has made it clear that it is seeking a third seat in the EP, but given the way Malta’s electoral system works, this third seat can be obtained even if the gap between the two parties in terms of first preference votes is still wide. It happened in 2014, when the PL obtained 33,000 more first count votes than the PN, but by the end of the counting both parties had elected three representatives each.

Will the PN claim victory if such a scenario is repeated in June? A third seat will no doubt make the PN happy, but if the distance between it and Labour remains the same or increases – in 2022 it was 39,000 votes – it will not be a satisfactory result for the party.

One important factor that we must keep in mind – and the political parties would do well to give it due consideration – is the number of people who will not turn up to vote. In the last general election of 2022, we had the lowest turnout in half a century, when only 85 per cent of the electorate chose to cast their preference.

Voter participation in MEP elections has seen a steady decline from the 82 per cent registered in the first round held in 2004, to 78 per cent in 2009, to 74 per cent in 2014 and 72 per cent in 2019. It is likely that the downward trend will continue in June.