Wishy-washy Malta

This is a very unusual election for this country. A historical one they're saying on TV. Usually the difference in votes between the two parties, while not enourmous, is large enough that a reliable indication of which party will govern can be quickly obtained by the parties taking a quick sample of the number 1 votes that were cast. In past elections, the winning party was always divined relatively quickly - usually by noon - leaving the rest of the day for the political hooligans to perform their various shenanigans in the streets.

Today however, the result appears to be so close - figures of less than 1000 votes are being bandied about - that no amount of sampling has managed to resolve the result with a small enough margin of error. This means that all the number one votes will have to be counted before a definite answer is obtained. This is already annoying enough, causing high tension in the country. Remember that this is Malta, where politics is the national sport. I cannot emphasise how seriously politics is taken by the Maltese. For an average (read "sane") foreigner to the Island this amount of fanaticism might seem perplexing, but one must keep in mind that Malta has been independent for only a very short time and self-rule is something that no Maltese takes for granted.

On the bright side it appears that the Nationalists will come up on top in number of votes. Due to the obtuse nature of the Maltese electoral system, however, this is not necessarily a guarantee of them being in power. The problem is that the Labour party has a larger number of seats in parliament, albeit having fewer votes. This is due to the way the country has been divided into electoral ditricts. In the 1981 election this situation had already happenned, with Labour taking charge with less votes but more seats. This is, of course, a perverse anti-democratic result. Due to this the two parties have since agreed amongst themselves, with lots of groaning and grunting, that in such a situation the party with the greatest number of votes would be awarded extra seats to make up for the deficit and allow it to govern.

This scenario will definitely apply to today's election - however there's a complication. You see, the law I described above only holds if two parties are elected into parliament. In their arrogance, the two major parties did not think of legislating for the eventuality of a third party making it too. Due to this ommission, the appearance of a third party in parliament would imply that, by default, this law would not apply and therefore the party with the most seats (and potentially least votes) would reign.

Guess what - it appears that the green party, a gnatfly that has never managed to elect a candidate, all of a sudden has a chance of electing one! This is not a likely happenning to be sure. He will definitely not make it in the first count, however there is no way to know whether he will manage to inherit enough second, third etc. votes to make it to home base unless we go through the whole blasted process. That means that we will not know for sure who the ruling party will be until tomorow. Grr.