Parliamentary elections held in Malta on March 26 were won by the Labor Party for the third consecutive year. Labor (‘Partit Labour’ in Maltese), centreleft, won 55.1 per cent of the vote, 39,500 more than the Nationalist Party (‘Partit Nazzjonalista’), centreright, the main opposition party, which fell to 41.7 per cent . The Maltese government will therefore most likely continue to be led by current Prime Minister and Labor leader Robert Abela, who has announced that he will form a national unity government.
According to the Malta Electoral Commission, turnout was 85.5 percent, the lowest in sixty years.
Widely predicted in polls, the Labor victory came despite various scandals and corruption allegations involving some prominent party officials in recent years, and despite the fact that under the Abela Malta government they ended up on the party’s ‘grey list’, according to the Financial Action Task Force, an intergovernmental organization dedicated to monitoring countries that it believes are not doing enough to combat illicit money trafficking and terrorist financing.
Abela is a lawyer, has been a Member of Parliament since 2017 and is the son of George Abela, President of the Republic of Malta between 2009 and 2014. He was appointed leader of the Labor Party and Prime Minister of Malta in January 2020, succeeding Joseph Muscat accused of interfering in the investigation into the murder of investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.
The Maltese government has also been accused of creating a “culture of impunity” that critics of Abela believe led to the murder of Caruana Galizia, who was killed by a bomb in her car in 2016. Caruana Galizia was one of the country’s best known journalists for her investigations into corruption in Malta and was the first to expose the involvement of some key members of the Muscat government in investigations into international tax evasion in connection with the socalled “Panama Papers”.
During the election campaign, Abela spoke primarily of Malta’s economic growth during the nine years of her party’s government and promised significant investments in the creation of green spaces, in tax cuts and the expansion of social initiatives for the poorest sections of the population.
Also read: The case of Daphne Caruana Galizia, right from the start