The European Parliament election in Malta, June 12 2004

Abstract

As was forecast, turnout in Malta’s first election to the European Parliament (around 82%) was very strong, indeed the third strongest in the European Union after that of Belgium and Luxembourg. However, judged by national standards, this turnout was lower than the one that is normally achieved in general elections and closer to that in local elections. The main surprise was that the Opposition Malta Labour Party (MLP), which joined the Party of European Socialists (PES) in September 2003 and which, until last year, opposed Malta’s membership of the EU, grasped three of the five seats contested. This happened mainly because of the good performance of Malta’s Green Party, Alternattiva Demokratika (AD). In the 2003 general election, AD obtained just 1,929 first count votes and gained no seats in the House of Representatives. But in this election it managed to bite deeply into the ruling Nationalist Party’s (NP) electoral support, taking no fewer than 22,938 first preference votes, thus debilitating the NP’s ability to secure enough votes to elect three out of five seats contested. Indeed, the third seat went to the MLP without a quota. It is also likely that had the NP and AD concluded an electoral pact encouraging voters of both parties to continue giving their preferences to each other's candidates, something which is possible under the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system, the third seat could have gone to AD by a few votes, instead of the MLP, but not to the PN.