Votes aside, the most significant winner in last week’s European Parliament elections has been the Maltese female gender. The proportion of representation of 100:50 in favour of our selected MEPs is quite stupendous. It has not just broken new ground, it has shattered it. Comparison to representation in the House of Representatives should not even be attempted.

True enough, votes cast in favour of male contenders, later inherited by female counterparts, played a significant role in the final choice. But that is how the system of the single transferable vote, operated to its full extent, works.

The full extent means giving preferences to all of the candidates on a party’s list and, if you are minded to it, spilling over into an opposing party as well.

In this year’s case, the system featured its various facets, with substantial cross-voting in Gozo and not inconsiderable recourse to stopping short of completing preferences, thus realising a considerable non-transferable vote tally. These realised facets will provide plenty of input to the various party analysts, as they try to work out the significance of the voting pattern in a forward-looking manner.

That is, to try to gauge where support came from or not, and to attempt to reason out why, so that the conclusions give food for thought for party policy, tactics and, in particular, strategy, in anticipation of the next general election. It may seem a long way off, at four years, but time flies and tactics and strategy worked out in between will need to be tried and tested and mature.

As it is, on the face of it the parties will try to unravel the plot of the 80,000 eligible voters who either did not pick their vote or chose not to cast it. Very roughly, some 30,000 of them are the usual chunk who do not participate in general elections, some five per cent by not picking their vote and another seven per cent not casting it.

That leaves around 50,000 voters to analyse, all of whom are those who did not cast their vote. Why not is the question party analysts will be facing as they attempt to use the past as a harbinger of the future.

The work going on in this analysis will not be made public. It will not even be made widely known within the parties themselves.

It is not that it is secretive – more than anything it is delicate and depends on guesswork. It would be foolhardy to put interim conclusions in the public domain.

An elite group of analysts will provide ongoing briefs to their party leaders, split into four categories. An estimate of absent party faithful, of opposing faithful, of switchers and of don’t knows.

The parties will try to unravel the plot of the 80,000 eligible voters who either did not pick their vote or chose not to cast it

The first two categories will be the least difficult to gauge, given the information the parties have on their grass root support and applying to it the data of those who had a vote in their hands but did not cast it. The other categories will yield only tenuous guesstimates. Such is the nature of the game and that is why analysts exist, the more seasoned the better.

This time round, they will also be analysing why female candidates were so popular, especially the three of them who came out strongly on first-preference votes. Superficially, it is fairly easy to come up with main reasons.

Miriam Dalli is a striking TV personality, far more widely known than the fact that she has some four degrees to her name. Roberta Metsola had a strong year in the European Parliament, where she focused a lot on Maltese washing and was consequentially well reported and exposed in Malta. Marlene Mizzi too had a strong and broader presence in the European Parliament, though she gained less exposure in Malta.

Their record and style will be analysed in fine detail, well beyond the superficial aspect. The way they conducted their campaign, yielding not an inch to the other competitors in their own stable, will be of particular interest.

So much work will be going behind the scenes, based on a forward-looking agenda. A lot of work will also be going on in public, as our six MEPs begin to make their mark in the European Parliament.

The way they got there will be noted by fellow MEPs. Especially Alfred Sant, who had such a thumping success which bewildered those who mistook his long-standing anti-Malta-membership stance as anti-EU. And also David Casa, who is in for his third term as an MEP, probably a singular achievement among the 2014 clutch of members.

That, though, will be of short-term interest, leading to our MEPs being given significant tasks as committees and other units are appointed in the EP. Such appointments will be of surface interest in Malta and will not be followed much. The interesting factor will be how our MEPs grasp and even carve out opportunities to publicise and push forward Malta’s interests.

They can do that best by being truly Maltese and recognising that, as MEPs, they represent the whole of Malta, not just the partisan interests of their party. We have already had bad experience of that over the past year. One hopes we do not get repeat performances as we go forward.

As the Nationalists will have learned taking Maltese partisan divisions to the European Parliament do not necessarily yield bountiful domestic fruit, other than with the party grassroots. The main outcome is that Malta is given a bad name, which benefits no one.

Unless our MEPs take this philosophy with them in the European Parliament, the expensive 2014 EP election campaign and the sharp anxieties while the votes were being counted will have been no more than further circus politics.

Malta deserves better than that.