The next battleground

The conventional reading of Saturday’s election is not wrong. Labour has won a fourth consecutive mandate, with an enviable majority by pre-2013 standards. The Nationalist Party (PN) has lost again, even if less decisively than some polls predicted, while its new leader has emerged intact from his first national test, with an aura of energy and great potential.

But that account is incomplete. Elections are not only about who wins; they shape the next contest. 

Labour did not merely win more votes. It succeeded in defining the election as a test of management: stability versus risk, continuity versus disruption, competence versus uncertainty. It turned incumbency into authority (as well as used its power to distribute massive electoral bribes). 

Two questions will define the next five years. How realistic is it to reverse a 22,000-vote majority in four years (given that the opposition needs to be ready for an election called a year before it is due, as this one was)? And how will the PN and Labour try to win the battle of defining the critical questions?

The electoral majority is large in absolute terms. In comparative terms, though, it is less than it looks.

Labour’s winning percentage of votes cast is around 51.8 per cent – the same as the PN’s share in its heyday. When the 22,000 votes are scaled to the number of voters, they would be proportionate to 17,000 votes in 1992. 

That is more than the 13,000-vote majority the PN won that year but it is the same ballpark: 34 years ago, votes were more difficult to turn (less shameless patronage, fewer floaters and switchers). 

And, despite the PN’s seeming unassailability in 1992, within four and a half years Labour overturned the deficit into a majority of roughly 7,000 – a swing of about 20,000 votes. The system proved more reversible than it appeared at the time.

The 22,000-vote majority is neither secure nor illusory. It is a position in a field that is already moving.

And it is on this field that the asymmetric political battle of the next legislature will be fought.

Labour enters office with many advantages. It has a well-organised ground game – important for early warnings of the public mood. It retains the institutional instruments that allow it to shape political attention: a sophisticated communications operation and control of state broadcasting. They matter most when the contest is close.

The PN, for its part, has an unusual advantage. Its leader has passed a first test that often defeats new party heads: he has not lost credibility by losing an election. Indeed, he is widely seen as an asset. More than that, he has generated a sense – in parts of the electorate and within his own support base – that the party has stopped contracting and is ready to grow.

An election framed around quality of life is structurally difficult for any long-standing incumbent- Ranier Fsadni

There is an important qualification, however. Among professional and managerial voters sympathetic to the PN, I have encountered a recurrent ambivalence: disappointment that Labour’s margin was not reduced further, combined with a muted relief that the PN did not win outright.  

The sentiment is complex. On the one hand, it is informed by a sense that the party was not yet fully formed as a government-in-waiting; on the other, a grim satisfaction that Labour is going to have to face the five challenging years ahead.

The PN cannot continue to rely on its election strategy, centred around the leader. It is now time to make visible the team that surrounds Alex Borg and to clarify a programme that, during the campaign, sometimes appeared as a sequence of attractive proposals rather than a single joined-up vision. The PN has four years to make its case. 

Labour, by contrast, does not have the luxury of time in the same sense. It has projects that will address some of the voters’ misgivings – such as the new Gozo General Hospital, which will make a significant difference to its standing on the island. 

But the model that sustained growth through population expansion and intensive tourism has reached its limit. Further postponement now produces its own costs. Reforms carry immediate costs; avoidance compounds the resentment about the deteriorating quality of life. 

Like our cars, the government is running out of road. The terrain it chose in 2026 will defeat it in 2031. 

Labour is not without strategic flexibility. Labour will shift the terrain to cultural politics and civil liberties – and not just assisted dying. Abortion, not on its programme, could still enter politics through a private member’s bill or a promised referendum, framed as responsiveness. 

Strategically, Labour will pay attention to the changing demographics of Malta, where the new voters entering the pool tend – like most people under 45 – to frame abortion as a matter of civil liberties. The PN, meanwhile, is bound by its statute to define the issue as one of protection of human life.

An election framed around quality of life and governance is structurally difficult for any long-standing incumbent. An election framed around modernising Malta versus conservatism is something else. 

If the PN wins the battle over definition, it has the advantage in spite of its 22,000-vote deficit. But if Labour wins, it can go into the next election presenting itself – in spite of its two decades in government – as the party in tune with the zeitgeist.