This guest post takes a cold hard look at the numbers after the votes have been counted, and not the ‘projections’ that Joseph Muscat based his auto-canonisation on. Here’s one myth busted by a contributor known to me.
We have some more bad news for Muscat. His popularity is shrinking.
My analysis is a number-crunching exercise based on figures issued by the Electoral Commission. Comparisons are made like with like – this year’s MEP election results were compared to the previous MEP election result whereas the same thing was done on general election results.
In the 2014 MEP elections, the number of registered voters was 344,356 and 134,462 people voted Labour. That makes it 39.05% of the electorate. In this year’s election, the number of registered voters was 371,456 and 141,267 people voted for ‘Joseph’ (for this is what he was telling us). This represents a fall of more than one percentage point over the previous MEP elections to 38.03%.
Likewise, when comparing the results of the 2013 and 2017 general elections, the number of registered voters was 330,072 in 2013 and 341,856 in 2017. In 2013, PL obtained 167,533 votes, which is equivalent to 50.76% of registered voters. When compared to the 2017 figures, the 170,976 votes obtained by PL in 2017 represented 50.01% of registered voters (down 0.75%).
Having said that, Muscat’s losses cannot in any way be attributed to Delia’s contribution. If anything, his losses may be attributed to the ‘negative’ PN MPs and MEPs and the ‘negative’ bloggers, who expose Muscat for the liar that he actually is.
Muscat’s losses are not so apparent because, under Delia, PN has also lost ground. Considerably. And therefore the gap between the two parties has widened.
In these MEP elections, which were the only test for Delia to date, support for PN fell from 29.27% of registered voters (in 2014) to 26.55%. This 2.72% decrease is quite significant when one considers that it is the opposition party we are speaking about and when considering that elections have in the past been won and lost for a mere 0.5 percentage points.
Such is the state of the PN that despite the increase in the number of eligible voters from 344,356 in 2014 to 371,456 in 2019, voters for PN decreased in absolute terms from 100,785 to 98,611. The results of this number-crunching exercise are another reason for Delia to resign.
Maybe one day, we will see less of Muscat’s Mussolini-style poses. For now, we enjoy the fact that his air of invincibility is no more and cracks are starting to show up. His support is dwindling.