The general secretary of the Nationalist Party, Paul Borg Olivier yesterday refused to say whether he would be assuming political responsibility for the dismal result of his party in the European Parliament elections by stepping down.
He said Labour won its fourth seat and the sixth for Malta (provided the Lisbon Treaty is approved) because of "a quirk in the electoral system that does not need a full quota to declare a candidate as elected".
The party had already started an internal process to analyse the reasons which led to its defeat. "It is important for the PN to analyse its strengths and weakness after an electoral defeat. It is a healthy process for the party we need to go through collectively as we have done in past similar situations."
Dr Borg Olivier did not feel that fielding 10 candidates or having given a huge push to MEP incumbent Simon Busuttil as the party's front-runner had a negative determining effect on the PN's chances of winning the third seat.
"The PN was always very cautious on the number of seats it would elect. There were times before the election and at the start of the campaign when it appeared that it would be difficult for the PN to maintain its second seat. The result has shown that PN kept its second seat with 2.4 quotas on the first-count votes."
Dr Borg Olivier would not be drawn into saying whether he regretted the method agreed upon by the two major parties on how to elect the sixth seat. The decision was not guided by the PN's partisan interests and had in fact found the consent of all major parties, he added.
"The constitutional mechanism already provided for and applied in general elections was used to elect the sixth MEP, meaning that the unelected runner-up candidate would be elected."
His counterpart at the Labour Party (PL), Jason Micallef, was, of course, pleased with the final result but complained about the "tedious" vote-counting process, which, he said, needed to be revamped to reach European standards and ease tension.
Interestingly, while Malta took the better part of four days to go through 254,039 ballot sheets, Ireland, which also uses a single-transferable voting system, took under three days to elect 12 MEPs from a population of almost six million.
Dr Borg Olivier said the PN had always suggested ways of modernising the system and was still committed to do so.
Mr Micallef noted that the alphabet played an important part in the results of a single-transferrable voting system, explaining that "the game of inheritance" can throw candidates from one end to the other unexpectedly.