A long, drawn-out Nationalist Party leadership election campaign comes to an end in just under a week's time, when the PN's members will go to the polls with a clear question to answer: do they want their next leader to be Alex Borg or Adrian Delia.
It has been a campaign spread across over almost three months between two MPs, who were considered as being the closest of allies. Yet come next Saturday, one will be the jubilant winner, and the other will be the dismayed loser.
So what has brought us to this point, and what has emerged during the electoral campaign? The Malta Independent on Sunday summarises the PN's summer of politics.
A surprise resignation, an unsurprising rejection
Bernard Grech's resignation on 10 June came out of the blue. Many, not least the party's own MPs, were caught off guard by the sudden decision, even if it came after a poor showing in a political survey which showed that the party had effectively lost all the ground it gained in the European Parliament elections exactly a year prior.
In the days that followed, all eyes fell on Roberta Metsola.
She was seen by the vast majority as the person who could take the PN forward and make it a winning political force once again. A woman with a huge international stature, she could have been a talismanic figure who revived the party much like Eddie Fenech Adami had done decades prior.
Yet there was a not-so-small issue: she had been re-appointed as European Parliament President 12 months before for a term which ran until January 2027. Had Grech stuck it out until the next scheduled general election in March 2027, then the timing would have been convenient if the PN would have wished to change its leader.
The timing here though, was anything but. However much Grech made desperate public pleas to Metsola in interviews on party television, only the most naïve actually believed that she would ditch her post in Brussels - which is one of the most important in Europe - to come and take over a political party which is in its worst doldrums in its entire existence.
It therefore came as no surprise when she announced that she would not be seeking to contest for the post of party leader.
From then, the race was on.
Agreement or no agreement?
It was something of an open secret that Alex Borg and Adrian Delia would be among those interested.
For Delia, it was a matter of unfinished business, while Borg himself had always held aspirations to eventually become the party's leader. Neither of them, however, expected the opportunity to come when it did.
In the midst of debates on who would succeed Grech after Metsola excluded herself from the contest, it became clear that Delia and Borg were the people's favourites and the "will they, won't they" speculation centred on them.
For a party which has been fractured into factions at different points in the last decade, this presented an unusual situation: both Delia and Borg were known to be among the closest of allies. It is within this context that, a week-and-a-half after Grech announced his exit, an agreement was apparently struck up - if one of the duo contests, then the other wouldn't.
So when Delia officially announced that he would be putting his name forward to pick up from where he left off five years earlier, most assumed that would be the end of it and that things would be plain sailing from there on.
But a couple of days later, Borg followed suit and formally announced that he too would be contesting the leadership election.
The very existence of this apparent agreement between the duo to not contest against each came under the microscope - more so after the first set of interviews that took place with the two candidates.
Delia insisted that there was an agreement, while Borg insisted that there was no such thing. In an interview with The Malta Independent on Sunday later in the campaign, Borg did not give a definitive yes or no answer, instead saying that he has always believed that in a democracy the best thing that there can be is a choice.
The matter risked being the first flashpoint in what could have ended up being yet another tetchy leadership election for the PN.
A low-key campaign
Yet as the electoral race began, both candidates steered clear of focusing on each other and chose instead to focus on running their own campaigns.
Both Delia and Borg appear to have learnt from the mistakes made by Chris Fearne in his ill-fated leadership campaign to be elected as the Labour Party leader five-and-a-half years ago.
Fearne had led a very public campaign which made it appear like he was trying to appeal to the wider electorate, not the party membership base who had to elect him. Delia and Borg have steered clear of this.
Both of them have led a low-key campaign as far as the public eye goes: media interviews were limited to the very start of the electoral campaign, and since then they have instead taken to campaigning on the ground.
Both candidates have held multiple face-to-face events around the country for party members to attend, and they've been out and about among local communities - their social media feeds over most weekends are a which is which of the country's village feasts, for instance.
Expectations that the summer headlines would be dominated by the PN's leadership election also transpired to be untrue: such elections in the past have ended up being much publicised, toxic affairs - but this time around the electoral campaign has been a lot more low-key.
It helped that the government shifted the attention away from the PN by trying to introduce a sweeping planning reform on the sly - a reform that has been hugely criticised, and on which the government has been forced to backtrack into a public consultation.
The PN will be thankful for the diversion: it has allowed the electoral process to continue in a largely serene manner - and serenity has been difficult to find within the walls of Dar Centrali as of late.
Hobson's choice? Not quite
Both Delia and Borg have put forward a fair few of their own ideals over the last few weeks, as they push on to appeal to the party's membership base - and while the two MPs are aligned in some areas, they are offering different things in others.
When it comes to abortion and euthanasia, both candidates are roughly on the same page: they personally disagree with both. Delia would give MPs a free vote on both subjects so that they can vote in accordance with their conscience, while Borg would give MPs a free vote on euthanasia, but would maintain party discipline on abortion.
Both are also on the same page when it comes to overpopulation and tourism - they both want quality over quantity, a principle that the PN has been speaking about for several years now.
The duo has had their own areas of nuanced focus. For instance, Delia has placed emphasis on the environment by pledging a huge tree-planting project and extensively using AI to help solve issues such as housing and health monitoring.
Borg, on the other hand, has chosen to place a lot of focus on how he would revolutionise the PN as a party internally - an area where his counterpart has only promised a convention among all members to discuss the way forward.
This is the area where Borg and Delia appear to digress the most. Borg, for instance, would introduce a second deputy leader and appoint a CEO to administer the party - Delia disagrees with the need for both of those roles, saying instead that he feels the post of secretary general should be strengthened.
Borg has also pledged to completely revamp the party's media wing and appoint an audit committee to assess the party's ailing financial situation and come up with ways to improve it.
Many feared that Delia and Borg would be pretty much one and the same - but while they both have their areas of overlap, it's certainly no Hobson's choice for party members come next week.
A debate which stuck - largely - to the script
With both leaders running a relatively on-the-ground campaign, the opportunities to see them in a comparable setting have been few and far between.
It was only last week that members (and the greater public) got the chance to see Borg and Delia come face-to-face in a debate - something which was only possible after the party, quite sensibly, turned away from its earlier decision to not allow debates between the candidates to take place. (A second debate will be held tomorrow.)
The debate was on home turf on the party's media wing, and anyone wishing for sparks to fly and dramatic arguments to ensue were left - perhaps expectedly - disappointed.
It was a debate where both candidates stuck largely to their scripts: they outlined their visions, beliefs, and proposals - things which they had already outlined in interviews and opinion pieces earlier in the campaign.
Besides disagreeing on how they'd reform the party's internal structures, the one flashpoint came when Delia criticised Borg over his track record in Gozo - a point which Borg has leaned upon a lot to show members of his credentials as a politician who can lead the PN to electoral victory.
Borg has said that he and his team together with the party's candidates had turned the PN's fortunes around in Gozo. "On the ground, the PN always won against PL in Gozo ever since I've been in Parliament," he said.
Delia was keen to quash that - saying that it's simply incorrect to say that the PN had won in Gozo.
"When you contested in Gozo, it was the party's worst defeat since 1955. Labour won 55% and PN won 41%, so we can't keep saying we won," he told Borg. Borg retorted that the "politics of pointing fingers" in this manner is exactly what he didn't want in the PN.
It may have been one argument - but it did show that there is some edge between the duo.
Another overarching theme was the emphasis on the need for party unity, particularly as they both believe that a general election is around the corner and that the party can only put up a strong challenge to take government if it is united.
The current legislature runs until March 2027 - but there has been plenty of speculation that a general election may come earlier, not least because Prime Minister Robert Abela himself has refused to exclude it.
Whatever the result, both Borg and Delia have pledged to get behind whoever wins - something which was again driven home during the debate.
It may sound like one of the more obvious points - but considering the PN's flirtations with blowing itself to bits from the inside in recent years, it's a point that members will likely be reassured to have heard.
The electoral process
It will be the PN's members who will vote for the party's new leader. This is the third leadership election since the party's statute was changed to put the choice in the hands of the party's members, or tesserati, as they are better known.
The electorate will be made up of 20,600 paid-up members. Polling so far has been mixed - but what is certain is that a huge chunk of party members remain undecided as to who they will vote for.
Early voting took place over the course of last week, while election day will be Saturday, 6 September.
Till then, the final sprint for who will be the Nationalist Party's 11th leader is on.