Labour defending 17-point majority

Labour will be defending a 17-point majority achieved in 2012 in the 34 localities in which elections are being held this Saturday.

The 2012 round of local elections coincided with a period of political instability following Franco Debono’s abstention in a vote of no-confidence presented by the opposition in January that year and were held a year before the PN was trounced by a 12-point margin in national elections.

On that occasion the PL won a majority in 19 out of the 34 councils where elections are due now.  

Moreover Labour has a majority of over 60% in 15 of these localities. The PN has a majority of over 60% in eight localities.

Prior to 2012 local elections in the same 34 localities were held in 2007 and 2008. In this round of elections the PL had won a 52% majority. The 2008 round of local elections coincided with the PN’s wafer thin majority in the concurrent general election.

Among the 35 localities in which elections will take place this week, Mosta, Gzira, Qala, Safi, St Paul’s Bay and Xaghra (Gozo) were the only ones to have ever changed their majority since 1999, when Labour started contesting local elections as a party.  

Safi, St Paul’s Bay and Qala changed their majority in the 2012 election while traditionally PN-leaning Mosta was won by the PL in 2007 and regained by the PN in 2013. 

The battle for Mosta and St Paul’s Bay

Mosta and St Paul’s Bay are the two largest localities in this round of election. St Paul’s Bay was lost for the first time by the PN in 2012 while Mosta was recovered by the PN thanks to vote transfers after the PL won 14 more first count votes than the PN.

In the four contests before 2007 the PN had won the Mosta election with majorities varying from 62% in 1998 to just 51% in 2004.  

But following a focused media campaign directed against a controversial contract for the services of a handyman, Labour managed to snatch the Mosta prize in 2007 with a wafer thin one-seat majority after winning 50.6%. In that election the PN saw its support in Mosta fall to a historic low of 46%.

But following the election of new mayor Paul Chetcuti Caruana, the council was brought to a paralysis due to factional infighting within the Labour camp.

The PN media has taken full advantage of this situation, highlighting the failures of the Mosta council and transforming it into its main battleground in the 2012 round.

The PL reacted by presenting a new team of councillors and ditching its former mayor.

The PL ended up winning 14 first count votes more than the PN but vote transfers following the elimination of the AD candidate favoured the PN which snatched a one seat majority.

In 2012 Labour had managed to snatch Saint Paul’s Bay – a solid Nationalist-led locality where the party enjoyed a not insurmountable majority of 54% in the previous council election. 

The Labour media had focused on the poor state of the roads and targeted mayor Graziella Galea (daughter of former Minister Censu Galea) for a number of shortcomings in the locality, particularly in the Bugibba area.

The PL ended up winning that election with 53% of the vote. The PN saw its vote count crash from 4,364 to 2,505 while Labour increased its vote from 3,019 to 3,138.  The drop in the PN’s vote is largely attributed to a massive decline in turnout, from 67% in 2008 to just 35.3% in 2012.