Nationalist Party leader Alex Borg secured almost 22,000 votes across the 12th and 13th electoral districts, the latter being Gozo his home district. This was the largest amount of votes for any candidates in the General Election with Robert Abela garnering almost 19,000 votes.
The Nationalist Party made one of its strongest gains of the general election in Gozo, overturning Labour’s advantage from 2022, but still failed to win a majority of seats on the 13th District.
In the 2022 general election, Labour had won Gozo comfortably, taking 53.54% of the vote against the PN’s 43.94%. On 26,355 valid votes, that amounted to a Labour lead of around 2,530 votes, or a gap of 9.6 percentage points.
This time, the result was very different. Turnout in Gozo reached 89.43%, with 28,475 votes cast from 31,842 registered voters. PN leader Alex Borg, secured 12,211 first-count votes on the 13th District, almost double the 6,108 first-preference votes he obtained there in 2022.
Alex Borg’s party leadership vote helped the PN reverse Labour’s 2022 lead in Gozo. Reports from the count said the PN finished 144 votes ahead of Labour in Gozo. On the basis of the votes cast in the district, this represents a very narrow lead of around half a percentage point.
But under Malta’s single transferable vote system, winning more first-count votes in a district does not automatically mean winning more seats. Candidates are elected through quotas and inherited votes, and the order in which votes are transferred can decide the final seat.
That is what happened in Gozo. Although PN edged ahead of Labour in votes, Labour still managed to elect three candidates from the district, while the PN elected two. The final seat reportedly went down to just a handful of votes after transfers.
The result therefore shows two things at once: PN achieved a major political swing in Gozo, reversing Labour’s 2022 lead, but Labour’s vote transfers were strong enough to preserve its three-seat majority in the district.
Frank Anthony Tabone was later elected through the Constitutional Mechanism, which adjusts parliamentary representation so that the final number of seats better reflects the national vote gap between the parties.
Sports Editor
Veteran Journalist
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