With the third consecutive defeat at the general election and the resignation of its leader, the Labour Party is yet again facing an uncomfortable post mortem and the crucial question of how to recast itself as a credible alternative to a PN government.
With the turnout at Saturday's general election down to a record low of just over 93 per cent, even the Nationalist Party, which lost almost 2.5 percentage points in support on 2003 to win a relative majority of 49.34 per cent, has a lot to reflect about.
Yet, after almost 20 years in government, counting out Labour's 22-month stint in power between 1996 and 1998, the opposition should have won this round hands down.
Instead, the PN seemed to have suffered from the low turnout but not from a swing to Labour. Conversely, while improving marginally on its position over 2003 with 48.79, the MLP never regained the 50.7 per cent it had achieved in its historic 1996 election. The party held a lot of promise in that election but somehow never managed to reignite that flame.
When asked to reflect on what went wrong for the MLP, political historian Joe Pirotta says the PN largely managed to put Labour on the defensive in this campaign.
"I think the campaign was won and lost on a line dictated by the PN, which was: Whom do you trust to lead the country, Lawrence Gonzi or Alfred Sant? The result was clearly in favour of Dr Gonzi."
Dr Sant lost three elections since 1998, he continued, enough warnings for the party to realise that it should have taken up his offer to resign back in 2003.
Beyond this latest turn of events, however, Prof. Pirotta pointed out that Labour has only managed to win a majority twice since 1976, suggesting a systemic problem.
"I think the party did not manage to reform in a way to make itself appealing to people who traditionally do not side with it and has been pitching its message to its own people. Even though relatively small, the section of the population Labour needs to direct its message to is very influential," he added.
Incidentally, on this point Dr Sant said during the press conference announcing his resignation yesterday that he was not convinced the party needed reform, adding, however, that he wanted to leave the post mortem to the party without him interfering.
Historian Henry Frendo was largely on the same wavelength, insisting that "if not re-founding, the party certainly needed reform". The party still carries a lot of baggage that comes from the days of the Boffa/Mintoff split and the aggressive style the latter branded the party with, he said.
Dr Sant, to his credit, made great efforts to disassociate the party from that and certainly from the shady characters that were attached to the party's image, particularly in the 1980s. However, a part of that baggage lingers on, not least in some of the candidates that are still being fielded in Labour's name.
Prof. Frendo conceded that Dr Sant has been demonised by the PN, even though he insisted that the Labour leader had persisted in a series of mistakes that cost the party its credibility, not least its decision to freeze Malta's application to join the EU.
A former general secretary of the party and a historian himself, Dominic Fenech, however, roots the problem in the basic tactical orientation of the party. "I think (the party lost) because it expected to win by default," he said.
In the aftermath of the 2003 election, the party's top echelons must have concluded that, statistically, the next election had to belong to the MLP, in addition to the assumption that the only issue that had lost it the 2003 election was EU membership, a one-off.
As a result, the party focused a lot on recovering the party core and waited for the rest of the electorate to get fed up with the PN government.
"The focus on bad governance in this campaign bears this out. This is not to say that bad governance was not a very relevant and legitimate issue, because it surely was, but, evidently, the dissatisfaction of the electorate stopped short of swinging the pendulum all the way," Prof. Fenech said, while highlighting the PN's negative portrayal of the MLP and its leadership "as intrinsically bad" as effective, even if ludicrous.
The post mortem, he insisted, needs to look ahead as well as back at the reasons why Labour lost.
"Times change fast nowadays and so does society. The party must become inclusive again, convincingly so, not through effective public relations but through real mastery of the important issues," he argued, highlighting in this vein environmental conservation, which has been sorely lacking in Labour's electoral programme.
"It should also be an intellectual magnet, like other European socialist parties, because the Left everywhere is rich in thought. It doesn't need a leader who is an expert in everything but someone who rallies together talent and ideas; someone sharp and attractive, in other words."