The 2022 Maltese general election: an outcome foretold

Abstract

The Labour Party (PL) won a third consecutive victory by a landslide majority over the opposition Nationalist Party (PN), with no other parties gaining seats. The PL victory may be attributed to the party’s robust economic record and its apparent readiness to tackle the problems of governance and transparency that had dogged its administration and caused a mid-term change in party leadership. Meanwhile rifts within the PN alienated some of its support base and dented its plausibility as a party ready to govern. Striking features of the election were the fact that its outcome was highly predictable; a sudden drop in turnout; and the continued failure of third parties to obtain seats despite evidence of some voters’ disenchantment with the established parties. A gender corrective mechanism was used for the first time to increase the presence of women in parliament.

Keywords:

• Malta
• elections
• Labour Party
• Nationalist Party
• PRSTV

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Although the vote transferability in PRSTV means that the vote really counts when it settles on the last useful transfer—and this still holds true as far as the election of the individual candidate is concerned—tinkering with the system in 1987 and thereafter has established the principle that the first preference on a ballot sheet is counted as a vote for the party to which the candidate belongs. The reason for this was that in 1981 the Labour Party won the election with a majority of seats, while the Nationalist Party obtained more first-count votes overall. Following a period of political turmoil, the anomaly was resolved just before the election of 1987, when government and opposition reached an agreement and changed the electoral law so that the party obtaining the highest number of first-count votes would have the right to govern, if needs be, by being awarded bonus seats to give it a seat majority. In this article, vote figures received by parties refer to first-count votes. Subsequent tweaking extended the corrective mechanism to restore strict proportionality in any event. That is to say, in the final reckoning, the distribution of seats between the two leading parties must strictly reflect the ratio of first-count votes obtained, and if one party wins more seats than its votes warrant, the other party gets compensated with extra seats. In this election, the PN was awarded two bonus seats, after the PL had won 11 seats more than the PN, which was proportionately slightly disadvantageous to the latter, when considering the total number of votes polled by the two parties.

2 See other recent articles in the Elections in Context series: Faas and Klingelhöfer (2022); Little (2021); Pilet (2021); Prosser (2021), and Lopes (2022).

3 Although suspects were arraigned in due course, the trials had not yet reached their conclusion by the time of the election, and the real motivation of her murder remained unknown.

4 It behaves differently in Ireland, which like Malta received PRSTV in 1921, and it behaved differently in Malta on a number of occasions in the past, yet always drifted towards a bi-party system in the end.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dominic Fenech

Dominic Fenech is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, Head of the History Department and Dean of the Faculty of Arts, University of Malta. His main research and teaching interests are in the areas of contemporary Mediterranean politics, in Maltese political and constitutional history, and current political development. He has written reports for West European Politics on all Maltese elections since 1987. [[email protected]]