It has been five years since Robert Abela became the leader of the Labour Party, and therefore prime minister.
While his adversary at the time, Chris Fearne, ran a leadership campaign which was, in the eyes of a fair few, more akin to that of a national campaign, Abela's leadership bid was more reserved and centred on reaching out to party voters at grassroots level.
It paid off: Abela won the leadership contest with a surprisingly comfortable 58% of the support from the members of his political party.
At the heart of his leadership campaign was a short manifesto of sorts which outlined the four areas which Abela said he would prioritise should he be elected as Labour leader and, by extension, prime minister.
So, five years on, has Abela come good on his promises? The Malta Independent on Sunday looks at what the Prime Minister had promised, and whether those promises have been fulfilled.
Pledge #1: A decent home for everyone
Affordable housing was at the top of Abela's four-point leadership election programme, as he advocated for a solution which would not be limited by the government's supply of social housing but at the same time which does not prove to be unfair on middle-class families who had to take out a loan or undermine the housing market.
The solution that Abela proposed involved the country's stock of vacant housing - 41,232 privately-owned vacant dwellings, to be precise.
The idea was that the private owners of these dwellings would be invited to sell their units to the government at market price, with the government initially targeting snapping up 4,000 houses, with the most dilapidated ones being given the highest preference.
This would have been a major measure costing somewhere around the region of €600m just to purchase the units and another €260m to refurbish them.
Abela marketed this as a middle of the road solution which provides a decent home to live with no construction taking place on virgin land and which keeps the incentive to keep working and growing alive - all the while not creating an unfair situation for those buying their property.
The proposal suggested that this investment be funded through new housing bonds, financed by both the general public and the private sector, and backed by the physical stock of housing units themselves, with government support.
The bonds would have had a fixed and guaranteed rate of return which was financed by income generated from payable rent, which was to be set according to social benchmarks, and supplemented by the government itself should there be a shortfall.
The government would have also been financing the refurbishment of the stock of properties across a period of four years. Tenants would have to pay rent but could never purchase the house they would be in.
After Abela took office as Prime Minister, the idea never took off.
There have been several efforts to ensure more affordable housing by the Abela administration, including a €10,000 grant to all first-time buyers and an equity sharing scheme which sees the Housing Authority help people purchase a residence - but none of them come close to the scale that Abela had envisioned in his leadership programme.
Pledge #2: Free medicine for all pensioners
The second pledge, which was made by Abela, was "free medicine for all pensioners" which was intended at addressing the "number of pensioners who face a substantial monthly recurring cost on medicine".
In his leadership manifesto, Abela noted that this was because of the fact that while the government covers a considerable list of medicines through its formulary, it doesn't cover all of them.
"Almost 28% of people aged 65 years and over are at risk of poverty and this is part of the problem," Abela's document reads.
"The prevalence of poverty among old-aged people is because in Malta, the number of households where both spouses receive a pension is still the lowest across the EU. It is not acceptable that after a life of sacrifices our pensioners have to choose whether to buy their medicine or food," the document adds.
The solution which Abela presented is, on paper, quite simple: "The government foots the bill on medicines in order to help those pensioners in this situation today and to offer peace of mind to future pensioners that their pension will not be jeopardised by unforeseen medical bills."
Abela had quoted NAO data which said that there are around 56,000 households where at least one adult is over 65 years of age, and said that such households spend around €640 on medicines every year. From this, the cost of this measure was worked out to be €40m.
During his leadership, Abela pledged that the measure would be implemented across a period of five years - but five years have now passed, and while there have been measures towards this end to some extent it's a measure which today remains unimplemented.
Pensioners still have to pay for medicines not on the government formulary - but there have been improvements in this regards, particularly through the widening of the eligibility for the Pink Form, which provides free medical aid.
As from 2022, all those aged 80 or over who receive the Supplementary Allowance - which is an allowance that can be awarded to any person having a low income, including pensioners - became automatically eligible for the Pink Form, bypassing the need for the standard means test.
During the last budget, Finance Minister Clyde Caruana announced that this eligibility would be widened to now include all those who are 75 years old or older who receive the Supplementary Allowance.
Pledge #3: A wage you can live a good life with
Abela's third pledge was to ensure a wage "you can live a good life with" and that effectively revolved around the principle of stopping cheap labour as he noted that the salaries of workers in lower-end jobs was not increasing in parallel to those in higher-end jobs.
He had put forward two proposals in this regard.
The first concerned work permits in order to "safeguard the labour market from unscrupulous employers who play the system to gain added leverage over their workers through poor working conditions".
Here, Abela proposed that employers will be allowed to employ foreigners on a single work permit if they offer salaries comparable to wages in that sector and pay them through cheques or direct bank transfers - not cash.
He also proposed that employers be disbarred from getting new or renewed permits if they fail to honour the working conditions set by law or are caught employing foreign workers without the necessary permits.
These are proposals which weren't given much heed over the past five years: only the obligation for all salaries to be paid via bank transfer has been announced, with Abela saying in October 2024 that a legal notice to this end was to be introduced.
That changed this week however as the government unveiled its new Labour Migration Policy. Among the 32 recommendations in the document, one finds the recommendation that employers found to be in breach of employment conditions, employment-related regulations, and Maltese law will be barred from employing Third Country Nationals.
This policy not only lines up with Abela's proposal five years ago, but would go several steps further should all of the recommendations within it be implemented.
The second proposal that Abela tabled five years ago was to enshrine the Equal Pay for Equal Work principle in order to remove any salary discrimination between directly employed workers and those employed through an agency.
This is a principle which Abela has spoken about on more than one occasion, and which was also included in the PL's 2022 general election manifesto.
In June 2024, Abela announced a legal notice which gave the principle the necessary legal standing for it to be legally enforceable. This came into effect on 1 January.
Pledge#4: A Green Malta for our children
Abela's final pledge was a very simple one: creating a greener Malta.
"Every space, open area and/or unused public land must be filled with soil and mature trees. Adding trees to our landscape should not be an afterthought but a commitment that involves continuous care," Abela's document read.
The pledge was born out of the growing concern at the time that Malta's environment was deteriorating.
A Eurobarometer survey in August 2019 - a few months before the PL leadership election - ranked the environment among the top three concerns for people (together with immigration and housing), and criticism that the Labour Party had drifted far too close to the sphere of influence of developers was rife.
This pledge found itself as one of the cornerstones of the Labour Party's electoral manifesto in March 2022, as the party promised a €700m drive to make Malta a greener country.
Following the party's subsequent landslide victory, the agency Project Green was set off with the task of bringing this vision to life. By October 2024, the agency had completed 18 open spaces and regenerative works in 10 valleys.
Another 19 projects, spanning 120,000 square metres, are scheduled to be completed in 2025 while another 22 projects spanning some 1.3 million square metres will kick-off this year. The work in this regard, therefore, is ongoing.
But this doesn't mean that Abela's administration has been immune from controversy. While certain parcels of government land were divested from the Lands Authority to Project Green to be turned into open spaces, there were others - such as a parcel of land in Mellieha - which was transferred for commercial development.
In that case, a public open space in the heart of an urban area which - in theory - would have been a prime candidate for a more rehabilitated green space, is now set to become a complex of 109 flats and 171 garages.
So while Abela gets plus points for largely sticking to this pledge - it's not been without mis-steps along the way.