The Nationalist Party's leadership election over the weekend turned out to be, as predicted, an extremely close contest between Alex Borg and Adrian Delia.

In the end, Borg triumphed over his mentor by a wafer-thin margin of just 44 votes as he picked up 50.1% of the votes of the party members who partook in the election.  It is the closest ever margin in a party leadership election in Maltese history.

The Labour Party has sought to paint this result as being a sign that the PN is split down the middle - but this is a silly conclusion to draw. Democracy is equally in action irrespective of whether a candidate wins with 90% or 50.1% of the votes in an election.

This was an electoral campaign which was contested cleanly by both candidates: the tensions that characterised previous PN leadership elections was, this time, absent.  In theory, that means that the PN will be able to emerge stronger from here on out and that it should be easier for Alex Borg to unite the party under his wing.

However, what this election did expose is a key shortcoming of the party: it is simply not as organised as the Labour Party.

Last weekend's election brought inevitable comparisons with the last leadership election of the Labour Party held at the turn of the year in 2020 - and the comparisons do not paint a good picture for the PN.

For starters, this was an electoral campaign which dragged on for simply too long. It took three months from Bernard Grech's surprise resignation for the party to elect his successor.

During those three months, Malta's political opposition was practically paralysed due to the uncertainty of who would lead it. Since his resignation, Grech largely stayed away from the spotlight, appearing only on a handful of occasions - likely not wanting to create or cause any impositions on his successor.

Half of those three months was taken up by a due diligence process which was to identify whether the two candidates were idoneous to hold the position of party leader. Now, of course, due diligence is important - but in this election, it was also rather pointless.

Both Delia and Borg are already sitting MPs having been elected in the 2022 general election where, presumably, they will have already undergone a due diligence process in order to be approved as candidates. Was the conclusion of this due diligence process ever going to be any different? Imagine if the due diligence had found that one of the candidates was not fit to be party leader - what would that say about the party allowing him to contest as a general election candidate in the first place?

It then took another six weeks to come to election day, featuring two debates after a U-turn by the party on its early guidelines for the election.  There have been general elections with shorter electoral campaigns than that.

Then we come to election day itself. It took until 4am for the party to issue an official result.  One can understand that when an election is as down to the wire as this, it is prudent to take more time in order to reach a conclusive result - but that doesn't excuse the lack of communication on what exactly was happening.

People following the election were told that only NET Television would carry the official details: yet as late night turned into early morning, NET TV was for long periods a static camera shot with music looping in the background.

Even those confined to the makeshift press room within the party's headquarters were, for periods, none the wiser as to what exactly was happening.  This of course allowed speculation to run miles: Labour Party mouthpieces suggested that there were shouting matches, multiple recounts, and who knows what else, and the party persisted with a 'political analysis' programme on its own media outlet until the early hours of the morning - while NET TV said nothing.

Contrast this with the Labour Party's last leadership election: it took the party just a month (part of which was taken up by the Christmas period) to elect a successor to Joseph Muscat.

Voting in that election closed at 8pm (in the PN's case it closed at 7am), with the counting process starting just after midnight. Abela was announced as the winner at 1:35am, but viewers could follow the whole count as it happened through a live counter that was aired in the party's coverage.

If last weekend proved anything, it's that the Labour Party remains the more organised party.  Add catching up on that to Alex Borg's near-enough never-ending to-do list as party leader.