Election History Bites | Labour’s better history with absolute majorities

Since its first contest in 1921, the Labour Party registered nine absolute majorities—1945, 1947, 1955, 1971, 1976, 1996, 2013, 2017 and 2022. And had the party not split in 1949 following the feud between Dom Mintoff and Paul Boffa, who formed the Malta Workers Party, it would have enjoyed absolute majorities throughout all of the 1950s.

Statistics show that the PL has historically achieved some of the strongest absolute majorities, ranging from 59.9% in 1947 to 55.1% in the 2022 election.

The overall picture is one of a party that has historically found it easier to build an absolute majority when compared to its main rival, the Nationalist Party.

Indeed, the PN last enjoyed an absolute majority of votes in 2003 when it won the election that decided Malta’s European fate with 51.8%. Its last victory at the polls in 2008 was a relative majority of 49.3%.

Historically, since its first election contest as the PN in 1927, the party has only managed absolute majorities in five elections—1981, 1987, 1992, 1998 and 2003. Its strongest results were achieved in 1992, 1998 and 2003 when the PN obtained around 51.8% of the vote.

The 1981 election, the first in which the PN obtained an absolute majority, was the first under the leadership of Eddie Fenech Adami, who had sought to widen the party’s appeal to working class voters. But the overall picture is that of a party, which has historically found it hard to obtain an absolute majority.

This suggests that the PL’s historical roots in the working class have given it a bigger core vote than its main rival, making it easier, with the right discourse and policies to grow into an absolute majority party.

Apart from the two traditional giants, there was just one other occasion when a different political party obtained an absolute majority—Gerald Strickland’s Constitutional Party, which won 54.5% of the vote in 1939.

Election History Bites powered by Agenda Bookshop is a series of election-inspired stories that will be published from Monday to Friday every morning throughout the election campaign