Nationalists hail victory, Labour trivialise result
Gerald Fenech Different parties have supplied wildly different interpretations of the results of last Saturday’s hamlet elections - the first of their kind ever held.
The usual statements quoting ‘the principle of subsidiarity’ and ‘in the interests of the locality’ featured high on the Nationalist Party’s reaction to the elections, which it won a decisive 63% of the vote compared to Labour’s 34%.
Labour on the other hand dwelt on the remarkably low turnout to minimise the elections’ importance.
Although at first glance the result looks satisfactory for the party in government, it can also be interpreted as a flop if one analyses the results carefully.
The whole exercise spells worrying signs of voter apathy which is getting singularly worse with each election.
Nowhere was the turnout worse than in Xlendi, which is admittedly a tourist resort but out of 497 registered voters only 117 bothered to cast their ballot. With 17 invalid votes, these actually determined the outcome of the election although how you can get elected with just seven votes as was the case with Mark Anthony Cassar beats me.
And although the PN won convincing majorities in Madliena and Kappara where they polled around 75 per cent of the vote there, Labour did surprisingly well in these upper class areas with their candidate polling strongly and quite easily elected especially in Kappara with Robert Vella Bonnici just two votes shy of the 200 mark.
In Bubaqra, a supposedly Nationalist part of heavily Labour Zurrieq, the PL candidate actually outperformed all PN candidates by a considerable margin with 254 votes out of 530 cast. Marsalforn and Paceville went the PN’s way as did Fleur de Lys with the only respectable turnout at around 49 per cent.
The lack of interest in these elections evidently also spread to the Department of Information who only uploaded the results on their website on Monday, a full two days after the elections were over.
This meant that the independent media had to rely on political party news media for the results which were available on Saturday at around 7pm.
Speaking to Malta Today, Local Councils spokesperson for the Labour Party Stefan Buontempo said that this was a clear vote of apathy in politics notwithstanding the efforts made by the PN to get out the vote.
“These were PN leaning localities and voter enthusiasm was lukewarm to state the least. It is clear that people are fed up with politics and have no time for cheap propaganda but just want to get on with their lives.
I am also curious to learn how local council Executive Secretaries are going to start functioning properly when in some cases like Rabat they have to deal with three councils (Rabat, Bahrija and Tal-Virtu)”.
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