PL supporters hoist flags on their porch, just round the corner from the PN headquarters. Photos: Chris Sant Fournier

The large flat screen mounted on the facade of the Nationalist Party headquarters in Pietà was beaming images from the Naxxar counting hall at 10.55am.

About 100 PN supporters were there, pacing up and down, biting their finger nails. “We’ll continue to have hope till the very last minute,” they kept muttering.

Time stood still as the sound of Labour agents pounding on the perspex as the votes were being sorted blared from the screen. Next thing, PN general secretary Paul Borg Olivier appeared conceding defeat.

In the blink of an eye, everyone scampered.

There remained just a bevy of policemen and two gentlemen squatting on the roundabout holding their scarved heads in their hands, shell-shocked their party will no longer be in power.

Within a couple of minutes, neighbours in front of the PN headquarters get busy and hoist two flags on their porch: the old and the new Labour flags, side by side.

Just a corner away, the cacophony of horns and squibs (suffarelli) is getting louder. From Pietà to Paola, it was all scenes of jubilant carcading.

Labour flags were being hung out of balconies and carried in cars, people were perching out of the windows, singing to the stereo blasts of “Come on boys and come on girls”.

Hundreds gathered in Paola, Vittoriosa, Cospicua and Żejtun. Earlier visits had seen smaller crowds professing that Labour was bound to win but they would not flirt with destiny – as they did in 2008 – so they kept their red shirts under wraps and their flags rolled up.

The hundreds of supporters gathered in front of the Paola PL club were ecstatic. Club president Stephen Abela said the win was not a “complete surprise”. “The surveys were spot on,” he said.

By then the news on the scale of the landslide victory was filtering in: “X’għamilnilhom!” (look what we’ve done to them!) the crowd started chanting.

Vittoriosa square was another sea of red. Labour mayor John Boxall, 58, was still incredulous at the landslide. “I don’t believe things until I see them,” he said. But his wife was more positive: “I had a gut feeling. I could tell that the way Joseph was speaking was appealing to people.”

First-time voters Mariano Rodriguez and Etienne Sammut were elated: “We voted for Joseph because he will give us youngsters a chance,” they said.

In Żejtun, the chant to “go to the Granaries” (in Floriana) started doing the rounds. People appeared on trucks, heading for the “victory meeting”. Impromptu stalls were set up in street corners selling horns, T-shirts and scarves. Beer, of course, was the overall winner.

Paul Attard, from Żejtun, was wearing a T-shirt with Proud To Be Labour written on it. He believed the major landslide was due to the Government’s arrogance.

“We are a European country and now, with the change that Joseph will bring, we’ll be like all the other EU countries: no more corruption,” he said.

No one seemed to be complaining about the traffic jams in the major arteries in the south. One car had olive branches sticking out of the windows.

What were these for?

“We are hunters,” shouted an elated Darrin Bilocca as he broke into a chant: “Il-kaċċa tagħna lkoll!” (Hunting for all).

Bonhomie excelled in a bumper-to-bumper accident in Marsa. The motorists alighted, scratched their heads, shook hands, exchanged Labour scarves and drove on.

If only it were always so simple.