Last month’s local councils were quite unprecedented in terms of the number of councils which ended in a stalemate owing to the election of independent candidates.

No less than five local councils ended up with no party having a seat majority: Gharb, Zebbug, Mellieha, Birkirkara, and Floriana.

Each locality has a particular reality. 

In Gharb, a former PN mayor ran as part of a residents’ party together with two other candidates.  David Apap had already been an independent mayor in the previous term, and he was comfortably elected again this year.  Not just that, his residents’ group polled at 56% - putting the two major parties in minority.

In Zebbug, independent candidate Steve Zammit Lupi – first elected in 2019 – this time ran with his mother Lilibeth and the young Joel Chircop also as independent candidates.  Clearly, whatever he has done in the past five years has been to the liking of the town’s residents: he was elected with 2,342 votes – three times the quota and far more than any other candidate.

His votes were enough for his mother to also be elected, meaning that the nine-person council was in a 4-3-2 seat deadlock.  Ultimately, Zammit Lupi was appointed as mayor on the basis of his sheer popularity, while the PL’s lead candidate Joseph Agius was appointed as deputy mayor since the PL was the party which achieved the most votes (although not an absolute majority, polling at 40%).

Mellieha meanwhile was a significant battleground district, and while the PN won the most votes and came within a whisker of an absolute majority – it achieved 49.04%, the election of independent candidate Matthew Borg Cuschieri meant that the seat breakdown was 4-4-1.

In this case, Borg Cuschieri polled 546 first count votes, making him the 5^th most popular candidate.  The PN’s Gabriel Micallef was the most popular with 1,525 votes, and eventually an agreement was reached that he would serve as mayor with Borg Cuschieri as Deputy Mayor.

The agreement was on the basis that the PN was the most popular party, and Micallef was, by some margin, the most popular candidate.

However, there is a more difficult situation in both Floriana and Birkirkara.  In both these localities, a single independent councillor has put a spanner in the works for the two major parties, and no agreement on who should lead the locality has been reached.

In Birkirkara, one of Malta’s largest localities, Kaylocke Buhagiar is the independent in question.  A former PL councillor, he received 999 first count votes and was –similar to Borg Cuschieri – the fourth most popular candidate. 

The PN was the most popular party, receiving 47.51% compared to the PL’s 41.66% - but the anomaly here is that the most popular candidate (albeit by just three votes) was the PL’s Yana Borg Debono Grech.

The PL’s proposal of Borg Debono Grech as mayor and Buhagiar as deputy mayor was rejected by the latter, and the PN’s proposal for their lead candidate Desirei Grech to be mayor was also rejected.

The situation is somewhat similar in Floriana, where past independent mayor Nigel Holland is holding out against the PL’s proposal for a PL mayor.  Here, Holland was the third most popular candidate in a council which elects five.  The PL are the lead party with 43.64% of the vote, followed by the PN with 31.01% - but the PN’s James Aaron Ellul was the most popular candidate.

It’s clear that there is a bit of an anomaly here: some think that the party with the most votes should have leadership of the locality, others think that it’s the candidate who has the highest tally of personal votes who should be the mayor.  Others think that the independent councillor should lead, being that there’s a deadlock.

Ultimately the final decision in such a situation must be one which best reflects the people’s democratic choice. 

The one electoral reform that could happen in order to deal with such situations is a renewed mayoral election – something of a final run-off: let the people decide who they want as their mayor, in the absence of an agreement.

But till then, it’s up to the parties and the independents themselves to come to an agreement.  One only hopes that any agreement which is reached is one which reflects and respects the choice of the people on voting day.