Updated 6.30am Sunday with updated turnout figures.

With Sunday’s vote counting process bringing the curtain down on this year’s European Parliament elections, party acolytes and armchair analysts alike are in for a busy day of number crunching.

Here are five things they will be keen to look out for as results trickle in:

1. The gap between the parties

The Nationalist Party will be hoping to drastically slash the gap between the two main parties, which rose above the 35,000 mark when Labour first regained power in 2013 and has barely budged since.

The gap during the 2019 MEP elections made for particularly grim reading for PN supporters, with PL sailing to victory with an almost 43,000 vote majority, a 16% difference between the two parties.

This dipped slightly to just over 13%, or almost 39,500 votes, in the general election three years later, but the gap is expected to thin further this time around. Recent polls indicate that Labour holds a 10-percentage point lead and could win by as many as 30,000 votes.

That would make it Labour’s narrowest EP victory since 2004, when it won by just under 9% of the vote, or some 21,000 votes.

That result was described as a landslide at the time but would likely be welcomed with open arms by PN this year, given the electoral fortunes of the two parties over the past decade.

2. Will Labour hold on to its fourth seat?

Malta’s six seats were always evenly divided between the two parties, until the balance tipped in Labour’s favour in 2019 and the party managed to clinch a fourth seat at PN’s expense.

It’s unlikely that a repeat is on the cards, and all points to normality being resumed, if poll predictions turn out to be accurate.

With the quota needed to elect a candidate expected to hover between 35,000 and 40,000 votes, Labour would likely need a repeat of their 2019 performance to hold on to their fourth seat.

Polls suggest that while Labour will almost certainly breeze its way into winning its customary three seats, it may fall just short of a fourth.

If Labour fails to hold on to its fourth seat, PN appears to be the seat’s most likely destination, with polls suggesting that the party’s vote share is just short of a third quota. Unless…

3. The rise of independent candidates

This year’s election sees the unprecedented involvement of 13 independent candidates, more than at any time in Malta’s recent political history.

In truth, few of them are expected to make much of a dent in the final result. Gżira mayor Conrad Borg Manchè and comedian James Ryder could well pinch some votes from younger voters, while blogger Simon Mercieca and former PN MP Edwin Vassallo are targeting older conservative voters.

But the only independent candidate who appears to stand a fighting chance of winning a seat is veteran Arnold Cassola, whose late surge in the polls has seen him rise to Malta’s third choice candidate.

While this suggests that Cassola could be this election’s dark horse, his election is far from straightforward.

His polling numbers are still below those of 2004, when he came within a whisker of winning a seat as an AD candidate but ultimately fell just short. And polls show that his first-count preferences are well below the electoral quota, meaning that he would need to inherit a good chunk of votes from other candidates to nab a seat. With inherited votes often falling along party lines, Cassola faces an uphill battle.

Still, a strong performance would mark a historic first, with independent candidates never managing to scrape together more than 2% of the vote in previous European elections.

4. Turnout implications?

The fate of Malta’s sixth and final EP seat could well hinge on how many people showed up to vote. Polling stations closed at 10pm and the Electoral Commission reported voter turnout at just under 73% nationwide.

Voter turnout tends to be lower for European elections compared to general elections, but the turnout for both has been gradually dwindling over the years.

And to further complicate matters, the Electoral Commission has changed its turnout methodology this time round, meaning a direct comparison to earlier elections will only be possible once the total, final turnout figure is released on Sunday.  

Malta’s first European elections back in 2004 saw a little over 82% of eligible voters cast their vote. This dropped by 10 percentage points by 2019, when just under 73% of voters participated in the election, more or less the same as this year.

That tallied with a recent Times of Malta poll which predicted that turnout was likely to hover around 73%, putting it in line with 2019’s figure. Labour was particularly keen to try see this increase, with most people who are planning to abstain believed to be in Labour-leaning districts, meaning that a higher turnout could well mean a larger victory for the party. Unsurprisingly, Labour focused much of its efforts throughout the campaign on getting the vote out.

5. How will the far-right perform?

Far-right parties are expected to perform more strongly than ever across Europe, with some projections estimating that the far-right could end up with almost 170 of the 720 seats in parliament once all member states’ counts are in.

Whether the far-right in Malta, most prominently represented by Norman Lowell’s Imperium Europa, will also perform strongly remains to be seen.

Lowell is one of the few candidates to have been a fixture in all five of Malta’s MEP elections to date, with the party improving its performance each time, from a paltry 1,600 votes in 2004 to over 8,000 in 2019, when it won 3% of the total vote.

Pre-election polls this time around haven’t indicated that the party is likely to dramatically increase its share of the vote, but far-right parties are known to perform better in elections than they do at the polls.

Some attribute this to the Bradley effect, a theory named after a black US mayor Tom Bradley who, in a shock result, lost a 1982 gubernatorial election to his white counterpart despite leading heavily in the polls. This theory suggests that voters may be ashamed to admit to pollsters that they support a far-right party, for fear of being deemed racist. As a result, polls often underestimate the true popularity of the far-right.

Whether or not this turns out to be the case in Malta is anybody’s guess, but will quickly become apparent once ballot boxes are opened on Sunday morning.