Malta on the ballot, Labour favourite but doubts about polls

As of 7 a.m. this morning, the 356,832 Maltese citizens entitled to vote began to express their preference in the legislative elections, convened on 27 April by Labour Prime Minister Robert Abela almost a year ahead of the natural deadline. Voting will end at 10pm and the count will begin tomorrow morning at 9am, with results expected within a couple of hours. Labour would have a 10-point lead over the centre-right Nationalist Party. But there are those who doubt that Labour can really win for the fourth consecutive time. In an editorial published by the investigative newspaper 'The Shift', Andrew Borg Cardona (one of Malta's best-known lawyers and an active defender of civil rights and the rule of law), speaking of the government's shower of election promises (according to the ECB, between March and April it increased the national debt by about one billion euros) wrote: "At the moment, rivers of money are being distributed among the voters with the subtle restraint of a drunken oligarch in a Monaco casino. All this raises the doubt that some polls are perhaps being manipulated after the fact' to convince nationalist voters to stay at home. In government since 2013 and confirmed again in June 2017, despite the wave of scandals unleashed by Daphne Caruana Galizia, Labour survived the barbaric murder of the journalist who was blown up with a remote-controlled bomb on 16 October (four months after the re-run election) and the revelations about the connections between Joseph Muscat's cabinet and the alleged instigator (tycoon Yorgen Fenech who, arrested in November 2019, is finally expected to go to trial by the summer). His successor Robert Abela took over in January 2020, two years later winning back an absolute majority with 55%. And the Nationalist Party last October chose to rely on the 30-year-old enfant prodige Alex Borg. A few months later, in full respect of his constitutional prerogatives, the owner of the Auberge de Castille - the seat of government in Valletta - asked for a new mandate in order to have more strength in the face of the global challenges represented by the war in Ukraine and the Middle East.