There will be no parade at No. 6 Convent Place, the seat of the Government of Gibraltar. While the usual rule is for the team calling the election to leave all of its personal belongings collected before election day, the coalition of Socialists and Liberals can still unpack its packages for another four years. The union of GSLP/GLP parties, led by socialist Fabian Picardo, has reconfirmed its mandate and Picardo will remain Prime Minister of Gibraltar for another four years. It is the fourth time he has won an election, but this was the closest, with three of the four polls conducted over the past few days and at the end showing the conservative opposition GSD party as the narrow winner.
In the end, the coalition managed to turn things around, albeit just barely, with 49.9% of the vote compared to 48% for the GSD. In Gibraltar, each of the 25,200 census voters can select a maximum of ten candidates from the same party or different parties. The 19,256 Gibraltarians who voted this Thursday gave 89,941 votes for the GSLP/GLP union and 86,537 for the GSD. This narrow difference of 3,404 votes between the main parties resulted in the Socialist-Liberal coalition winning nine of the 17 MPs in Parliament, with the remaining eight going to the Conservatives. Independent candidate Robert Vásquez, who received only 3,262 votes, did not make it into the chamber. Voter turnout this time was higher than in previous elections: 76.41%, compared to 70.84% in 2019, in which the Socialists achieved 52.5% support.
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For Picardo, Prime Minister of Gibraltar for twelve years, these were the most complex elections. The post-Brexit deal with the European Union and Spain as well as the pandemic have worn down the socialist over the last four years. So much so that Gibraltarians even left him a message when they voted. Joseph García, leader of the GLP and deputy minister in the previous government, overtook the coalition leader by eight votes. This is possible because citizens vote on open lists, in which they can mark up to ten candidates from different parties on long ballot papers. Joe Bossano, who was prime minister and has been a member of parliament for 51 years, won the MP record again with more than 8,300 votes.
The results, announced this Friday at six in the morning after a recount that began on Thursday evening, show that citizens voted more for candidates than for blocs. The decision becomes even more tangible in cases like the GSD candidate Yousef El Hana, who has been plagued in recent days by the scandal surrounding some anti-Semitic messages published in the past, for which the person concerned himself asked for forgiveness and withdrew it. After the independent Vásquez, Hana was the candidate who received the fewest votes.
The El Hana controversy is just one example of a “tough and complicated” election campaign – adjectives agreed upon by both Picardo and GSD leader Keith Azopardi in their post-election assessment. After seven years of deadlock over Brexit, and with Gibraltarians knowing it will take a while for the deal with the EU to happen – if it does at all – domestic issues such as health, housing and education have emerged as highlighted the main concerns of the Llanitos. So much so that in his post-victory speech, Picardo committed to working and carrying out reforms in these areas. “The administration as a whole must change to better respond to the needs of citizens,” the socialist promised in a speech at John Mackintosh Hall, where the ballots were counted.
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The Gibraltarian government’s finances have been another battlehorse, with the opposition criticizing debt taken on by the Rock during the Covid-19 crisis to help pay the salaries of workers – including cross-border workers – who have been left without work for months . In response, Picardo has also announced that starting April 1, all listed companies will make their accounts public “to prevent this.” It suggests there is something to hide, because there isn’t.”
At the end, Picardo reserved his brief reference to the contract that is intended to regulate relations with Spain in the post-Brexit scenario. According to the preliminary agreement on New Year’s Eve 2020, the contract is intended to make controls at the border with Spain more flexible in order to avoid a hard passage that would correspond to a non-EU area. However, all parties involved in the process – the UK, the EU, Spain and Gibraltar – have maintained silence for months about the progress, which Picardo had already assured was already focused on technical issues, as he said in the last interview with EL PAIS explained. This Friday, the Socialist asked the President of the Spanish Government to resume negotiations after both territories have completed their electoral processes: “Pedro, it is time for you too to form a government and for us to conclude the contract that we have together have begun.” .
After an election day marked by lines, but usually at more than 15 schools, the night of the counting was heartbreaking. The first counts showed that the trend was different than predicted in the surveys. These elections marked the first time a new digitized system was used to add security and speed to a traditionally slow count. In Gibraltar, the process takes place centrally at Mackintosh Hall, where taxi drivers transported the sealed ballot boxes from the various voting centers. The main candidates and hundreds of supporters and journalists were waiting there. Once the ballots were mixed – so as to avoid political biases in different parts of the city – they were distributed to 15 stations, where two technicians used computers to count the votes at the same time. As soon as the results are known, the new government is scheduled to take office this Friday.
These are the last elections in which Picardo plans to run as a candidate. In fact, that was his intention in 2019, but the debt forced by the Corona crisis caused him to rethink his position, as he explained this Thursday after the vote. “I didn’t want to leave with my tail between my legs,” he said. During the last election campaign, the socialist assured that he would stand down for the 2027 elections. He has even openly declared who should succeed him at the head of the party: Gemma Arias-Vásquez, candidate of the GSLP lists. Picardo defended that the Gibraltarian, a lawyer by profession like the current Prime Minister, was an “absolutely brilliant” professional.
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