Adrian Delia is now one step away from completing his redemption arc, and coming full circle.
Having been the PN's leader for three years already - a period which ended in a tumultuous and acrimonious divorce which threatened to destroy the party from the inside - it would have been on very few people's bingo cards that Delia would be taking another run at the party leadership post in 2025.
Yet, he was the first person to officially signal his interest to succeed Bernard Grech as Nationalist Party leader - and while the whims of local politics have certainly not been kind to him, the 55-year-old lawyer has built enough steam, since his being ousted, to give himself a chance of returning to the post he occupied until 2020.
Should the PN go back and give Delia a second chance? What are the pros and cons? What would a PN under Delia's leadership look like? The Malta Independent on Sunday finds out.
The backstory
Adrian Delia was something of a political outsider when he parachuted himself into the leadership contest on who would succeed Simon Busuttil as PN leader after the latter had led the party to another landslide electoral defeat in 2017.
Sure, he had some experience at grassroots level, but he had not contested any general election before throwing in his hat for the PN leadership post - meaning that he had no experience in elected politics at any level.
But this was seen as an advantage by the PN tesserati (party members) - who were voting to pick their own leader for the first time ever - and they elected Delia over more established candidates.
Delia promised a "new way" and reshuffled the PN's shadow cabinet to reflect that. The party took a more conservative stance under his leadership, but this failed to make any inroads with voters.
The biggest problem Delia faced however was that a portion within his own party never accepted him as leader. He had riled up some followers with disparaging comments about journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia before she was killed, and some within the party did not feel like Delia - or those he surrounded himself with - were cut from the same cloth of his more glorious predecessors.
His decision to ask Busuttil to resign from the PN's parliamentary group after the Egrant inquiry exonerated Joseph Muscat backfired spectacularly with his own MPs backing Busuttil over their party leader. Faced with the prospect of open revolt, Delia backed down - but the damage had been done.
A heavy defeat at the polls in the 2019 European Parliament and Local Council elections did little to allay concerns, and when survey numbers did not improve a group of PN MPs decided that enough was enough.
The summer of 2020 was characterised not just by the Covid-19 pandemic, but by the PN going through a very public divide that ultimately ended up in Delia losing a leadership contest against Bernard Grech by a hefty majority.
This is where Delia's redemption arc began. He initially lurked in the backbenches, refusing offers to take on a shadow ministry in October 2020 and again in January 2021.
As Grech's leadership managed to quell the tensions within the party, Delia was perhaps validated by his personal performance in the 2022 general election, as he was comfortably re-elected to Parliament - while the same could not be said for some of his harsher critics.
From then on he started to have a more active role within the party: he was the PN's spokesperson for transport, and then got his big break as the court case to have the controversial hospital privatisation deal rescinded - a case that he had fronted and made his own crusade from the get go - was upheld.
As the fallout rocked the government, Delia continued to grow in stature - and, behind the scenes, continued to build bridges necessary to come to the point he has today.
The statistics
Should Delia be elected as PN leader, it would be the first time in Maltese history that a leader of one of the two major political parties is elected for a second non-consecutive term.
No leader has left their role as party leader - in good or bad circumstances - to ever return to it later on. Delia would be an unprecedented first.
Delia's previous leadership tenure of the party was also unique in the sense that he is the only PN leader to have never led his party into a general election. With the next general election only - at the very most - two years away, should Delia be elected he would almost certainly consign that particular statistic to history's dustbin.
Otherwise, he fits the mould of what you would expect a PN leader to be: he is a lawyer, like every single PN leader before him, and at 55 years old he's pretty much the same age as Grech and as other PN leaders were when they led the party.
Adrian Delia and his partner Cynthia
The pros
The biggest pro in people's mind is that this is an Adrian Delia now hardened by political experience. Delia himself said that he is a different person from when he first became leader in 2017 - he described himself as having "evolved".
His experience in the last eight years means that he now knows the ins and outs of the party and of politics as a whole. By his own admission he said that he made "many mistakes" back then. "I had very little experience. I was not a politician. I know that on occasion I have caused hurt. I will be the one apologising not vice versa," he wrote in a column last weekend.
It's the type of humility that comes about when one is left to reflect on one's past actions - and it's highly possible that those within the party and those who followed it and have since been alienated by it may well be drawn to it.
Something which will also prop up Delia's legitimacy as a valid leadership candidate now is without a doubt the Vitals hospitals' scandal. It was Delia's crusade that got the hospitals' deal rescinded in the first place, and the concession has since unravelled to the point that its main advocates and actioners on both sides - including former Prime Minister Joseph Muscat - have been criminally charged in relation to it.
Beyond that though, Delia is seen as a strong orator, and an especially strong debater. He has a sense of charisma in how he speaks, but years of political experience have now led him to hone his messaging style to be more down to earth than it was when he was party leader.
The cons
The biggest thing that may be counted against Delia is that he's had his chance to be leader before - and however true it may be that he wasn't allowed to work with full serenity by elements from within the party, electing him as leader again may be seen as the PN turning back the clock.
There's a saying: "If you see the same tree twice in a forest, it means that you are lost" - and being lost is how many voters already perceive the PN. So turning back to the same person, who was already unceremoniously disposed of as leader once, probably won't do much to counter those perceptions.
Beyond this though, what may also count against Delia is that there is some baggage from the past.
The spectres of past allegations concerning a prostitution ring in Soho, stories about his personal finances, alleged ties to Yorgen Fenech, and of once referring to Daphne Caruana Galizia as a "biċċa blogger" may still be difficult to look past for some traditionally Nationalist voters.
In this regard, the passage of time may have healed for some - but others may still feel aggrieved by those instances; aggrieved enough for them to steer clear from a PN which needs every vote it can get.
The final question mark is on trust. This is where Bernard Grech consistently suffered in the polls: respondents simply did not trust him to run the country anywhere near as much as they trusted Robert Abela.
It is an area which Delia did not fare particularly well in either when he was leader: in the last survey before the 2019 European Parliament election, Delia was only trusted by 22.8% of respondents, compared to 50.6% who trusted Joseph Muscat and 23.2% who trusted neither leader.
By June 2020, Delia's trust rating was down to 17.8% compared to the 54.5% trust rating that new Labour leader Robert Abela garnered.
Looking at those numbers of course, the obvious thing is to ask how much of it was down to the PN's infighting at the time - but given that Grech failed to make a significant dent in his opponent's trust rating, many may question whether Delia will be capable of doing what he didn't manage to do five years ago.
What would a Delia leadership look like?
Being that Delia has already been the PN's leader, it is perhaps a bit easier to imagine what the party line and ideology would be should he be elected to the top post again.
What is certain is that under Delia's leadership, the PN took on a bit more of a conservative flavour compared to the previous years. Delia would frequently infer the party's Religio et Patria slogan - but it never translated into anything more than simply toying with the idea.
His first parliamentary motion as leader was to come out against a legal notice which granted vacation leave to lesbian couples seeking IVF treatment abroad. He insisted this was purely on legal grounds, but those with a more progressive lean did not see it that way. The motion backfired spectacularly: six of his own MPs abstained from voting on it on moral grounds.
He campaigned on an anti-abortion rhetoric, and was the root of the PN's rhetoric surrounding foreign workers - that, simply put, Malta has too many of them. These are two lines that the PN still includes in its day to day narrative.
On a party level, he used slogans like a "new way" or a "revolution" to describe the type of upheaval and reform that he wanted to pioneer. None of that panned out.
But that was over half a decade ago now - what about the Delia of today?
It's certain that one of Delia's first priorities would be to continue rebuilding bridges - whether they were burned by others or by himself. He will understand that party unity is of paramount importance if the PN is to stand any chance of recovering votes.
He has given hints here and there: in a blog on MaltaToday he wrote that there must be a discussion that leads to the PN's "redefinition" - a lighter piece of terminology when compared to the more gung-ho attitude to party reform that Delia had in 2017.
He also spoke about needing to look at subjects such as liveability - saying that Malta "has become a city", artificial intelligence, and more transparency when it comes to political party financing.
Delia has said that he feels that he has "evolved" as a politician in the last five years - and so far, it seems to show in terms of the subjects that he is choosing to prioritise.
Ultimately, it seems like Delia II could be more well-rounded than the revolutionary that Delia I wanted to be eight years ago.