Malta headed to the polls 25 years ago today, handing the Labour Party and its leader Alfred Sant a resounding victory and ending a nine-year streak of Nationalist Party government.

Labour achieved a 7,600 vote-majority over the PN, reversing a 13,000-vote deficit it had recorded in the previous election.

Though its 1996 margin of victory was relatively large by Maltese standards, it was still not enough to give Sant more than a one-seat majority in parliament.

That would prove terminal to the Sant government less than two years later.

The 1996 election was the first which the Harvard-educated Sant contested at the helm of the Labour Party, having taken over from Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici as opposition leader in 1992.

An economist and former president of the party, as well as an acclaimed writer, Sant’s appointment changed the face of the Labour Party as he modernised the organisation, gave it new headquarters in Ħamrun and its own television station.

He made a sharp contrast to the bullish and notorious Labour characters which tore his own party apart in the 1980s and early 1990s. He ditched unruly elements from the party and also started moving policies to the centre-left.

Surveys at the time were known to sometimes go off the mark and, in fact, some polls showed Eddie Fenech Adami heading towards a third election victory after 1987 and 1992. That PN dream was about to fade away when Fenech Adami infamously admitted to journalists as soon as vote counting started that the result could be a “photo finish”.

It was not so close, and Sant headed to the president’s palace to be sworn in as prime minister as Labour supporters celebrated in the streets.

Why did Labour win it? 

There were a number of reasons why the tide turned. After two terms, the PN administration was showing signs of arrogance, with rumblings of corrupt practices taking root.

Many believe the PN’s personal campaign against Sant, portraying him as an almost sinister and ruthless leader, had backfired.

Alfred Sant cleaned up the Labour Party, but was targeted for personal criticism by the PN.

Upon election, many of his critics applauded the way he opted for a semblance of continuity, retaining most of the civil service heads and insisting on transparency and the need to weed out corruption.

Although not the best of orators, Sant had managed to woo voters with a promise to remove VAT, introduced by then finance minister John Dalli in 1995.

Most controversially, he also promised to freeze Malta’s European Union application and take the country out of the NATO Partnership for Peace.

Labour's moves once in office

His foreign minister, George Vella (now the president), did both within days of taking office, with Sant insisting that he wanted to make Malta a ‘Switzerland of the Mediterranean’, a term first coined by Dom Mintoff many decades earlier.

He also launched talks with the EU aimed at establishing a ‘partnership’ .

Little headway was made in those talks, causing the economy to lose its momentum and direction.

The situation was made worse when the government forged ahead with removing VAT without having a clear idea of what to replace it with.

Finance minister Lino Spiteri, who had reportedly not been consulted before the commitment to remove VAT was made, resigned within a few months, although he stayed on the Labour benches.

He was replaced by former banker Leo Brincat who introduced a home-grown system known as CET (Customs and Excise Tax). 

It was cumbersome, full of loopholes, and fated to fail, as it eventually did, making Dalli, on the PN’s re-election, possibly the only minister in the world to introduce VAT twice.

Mintoff rift spurs government downfall

But VAT-CET was not what caused the Sant government to suffer a premature death.

The coup de grace was inflicted by Mintoff, never close with Sant, who in parliament accused the government of losing its social compass.

In 1997, he abstained on various votes in the budget debate but the straw that broke the camel’s back, in 1998, was a motion for the government to hand over the Vittoriosa waterfront to a private consortium for development into an entertainment area and yacht marina. Mintoff, elected from that district for over 50 years, saw red and warned he would vote against.

Dom Mintoff seated in parliament: the titan of Maltese politics bowed out with a bang.

Sant stood his ground and linked the motion to a vote of confidence, but Mintoff did not blink either, and the government collapsed after just 22 months.

Sant was defeated in the subsequent election and the electorate also went on to elect PN administrations in 2003 and, with a wafer-thin majority, in 2008.