The Nationalist Party's vote count plunged by 9.2% in 2022 when compared to its last general election showing in 2017.

Electoral commission figures show the party lost 12,463 votes over five years, going from 135,696 votes in 2017 to 123,233 this year.

Labour too saw a loss of 8,269 votes, dropping from 170,976 to 162,707. This represents a 4.8% drop on its 2017 performance.

The pool of registered voters in 2022 stood at 355,075 voters, up 3.9% from 2017. 

Both parties suffered from the 85.5% turnout for Sunday's election, a 60-year low. 

Labour won 55.1% of the vote, with PN attracting 41.7%, giving PL a 39,400 majority. 

Invalid votes climbed by a whopping 118.4% in this election, going up from 4,031 in 2017 to 8,802 in 2022.

Fight for third parties

Carmel Cacopardo has vowed to take up the fight for third parties in this election, after his party ADPD raked in 4,747 votes.

Cacopardo announced on Sunday that the party will be contesting the election result in court in a bid to gain representation in parliament. 

AD and PD, which were two separate parties in the 2017 election, formally merged in 2020.

This makes assessing their performance more difficult, particularly seeing that PD formed part of the PN ticket last time around.

Abela versus Grech

On the leadership front, Robert Abela triumphed over opposition leader Bernard Grech in the battle of the leaders in the fifth district.

Labour won the district 65.73% to PN's 33.25%.

In terms of all the valid votes cast on the Labour-leaning district, Abela attracted 44% of the votes, and Grech 25%, with the rest going to other candidates. 

On a party level, the prime minister won 9,996 votes from the 14,865 first count votes that went Labour’s way in the heavily red-leaning district.

Grech won 5,799 votes from the 7,244 that went the PN’s way.

Broken down as a percentage of their respective party votes, Abela attracted 67.25% of the Labour vote on the district.

Grech in turn won 80.05% of the PN vote on the district.