There were no surprises in the four lead candidates tipped to get elected for the two major parties after Saturday’s vote.

Alfred Sant and Miriam Dalli secured their seat in the Brussels Parliament for Labour and incumbents Roberta Metsola and David Casa did likewise for the Nationalists.

The bigger battle was for the third seat on either side, with the PN hoping to capture it from Labour.

But there was a surprise in the performance of Gozitan PL candidate Clint Camilleri, an architect, who garnered more than 13,000 votes on the first count. This placed him in fourth place just behind incumbent Marlene Mizzi.

Mr Camilleri made a clean sweep of Gozo for Labour, winning more than 6,600 votes and surpassing even Dr Sant, who had the most votes among PL candidates in all other districts.

He also did particularly well on the seventh district, where he is likely to have attracted the votes of hunters.

Incumbent Joseph Cuschieri, who started campaigning late, came in at a disappointing fifth with some 10,000 votes on the first count.

On the PN side, the incumbents did well, with Dr Metsola falling short of the quota by 3,600 votes at the first count.

Mr Casa came in second with a tally of almost 20,000 on the first count.

But a marked difference between the PN and the PL was how the party votes were apportioned between the individual candidates.

On the Labour side there were three candidates behind the top two who surpassed the rest by a significant margin.

On the PN side votes were more evenly spread out between four candidates immediately following the top two with a shorter distance to the next two candidates.

But beyond the fortunes of PN and PL candidates, the surprise was Imperium Europa’s Norman Lowell, who obtained more than 6,000 votes, surpassing Alternattiva Demokratika chairman Arnold Cassola, who captured almost 5,900.

Agents of the main parties were waiting with bated breath for Mr Lowell and Prof. Cassola to drop out of the race to see who inherited their votes. The sixth seat hinged on which party managed to capture the bulk of those votes.

Independent candidate Nazzareno Bonnici, contesting under the banner of Tal-Ajkla, won more than 1,200 votes on the first count.

He kept his hopes alive until the 10th count, outperforming PL candidates Peter Cordina and Fleur Vella and PN candidate Kevin Plumpton, all eliminated before him.

Eurosceptics Anthony Calleja and Ivan Grech Mintoff were both eliminated by the seventh count with the PL gaining most of their votes.

The atmosphere in the counting hall fluctuated between absolute calm and boredom to brief bouts of tension when vote transfers took place as candidate representatives sweated it out behind the Perspex to follow the progress.

The counting hall occasionally burst into applause as Mr Bonnici toured the place, shaking hands with everyone and giving short impromptu speeches as he was carried shoulder high by agents of the two major parties.

It was a breather that went down well with everyone and Mr Bonnici evidently relished the attention he got.

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