Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1545122
4 gozotoday | FRIDAY • 29 MAY 2026 NEWS Winning an election: Paradoxically How is an election won? Are extra seats awarded? How will the mechanism to have more women MPs work? Who wins the election? It's pretty simple really—the party with the most votes wins the election and gets to form a government. But it may get com- plicated if more than two parties elect MPs or an independent manages to slip through. What do you mean 'complicated'? Malta's electoral system has produced some quirky results in the past since the party that gets the most votes does not necessarily get the most par- liamentary seats. This changed in 2007 when the Constitution was amended to ensure that the number of seats a political party occupies in parliament is pro- portional to the number of votes it gets in the election. In the 2013 election the Labour Party obtained 39 seats while the Na- tionalist Party obtained 26 seats after the vote counting exercise ended. However, the proportion of seats won by the PL overstat- ed the party's electoral strength while the PN's seat tally under- stated its vote. According to the constitutional mechanism the PN was awarded four extra seats to bring the parliamentary bal- ance closer to the election result. A similar situation happened in the 2017 election when the PN was awarded two extra seats. And so, where is the complication? The 2007 mechanism only ap- plies if two parties are elected to parliament or, in a scenario where more than two parties are represented in parliament, one of them has an absolute major- Malta Parliament in Valletta